


blow my whistle

by menocchio



Series: rules don't apply [2]
Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Football | Soccer, M/M, Reunions, Unreliable Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:41:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 42
Words: 44,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28529376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menocchio/pseuds/menocchio
Summary: The first rule of coaching youth soccer is remembering the most important thing is everyone has fun.
Relationships: Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence
Series: rules don't apply [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2089869
Comments: 546
Kudos: 459





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You're gonna wanna read the first story in this series before reading this one.

“Think with your feet! Remember what we talked about, Emily, think with your feet! I don't see you _thinking_!”

The woman a couple feet down from them is decked out in a track suit of the team's colors, and her lung capacity makes any college football coach look meek in comparison.

Amanda doesn't take her eyes off her – safer not to, her gut told her – but she sidles closer to her ex-husband and says, “I'm all for Sam trying out different activities, you know that. But I can't get over how invested some of these parents get about the whole thing.”

“Yeah,” says Daniel.

“I mean, they're little kids. At this point shouldn't we all just be glad we got them outside?”

“Right,” says Daniel.

“You know, I did track for four years, and I don't think my mother came to a single meet.” She pauses, thinking. “I'm not sure she even knew I was on the _team_. And that was high school, when it actually almost mattered.”

“Mattered, right,” says Daniel.

“Competitive sports,” she muses. “Just not my thing. If you're going to get competitive, it should be over something that's actually worthwhile. Like, I don't know – money.”

Daniel says nothing, and she finally takes her eyes away from the unbridled enthusiasm of her fellow soccer mom. He is staring hard at the soccer field, a strange light in his eye.

She nudges him with the arm that isn't cuddling a thermos. “Hey. What's going on, am I about to lose you to the fever pitch of the game?” She is mostly joking; she's pretty sure Daniel hadn't done sports in high school.

Except he doesn't respond; her smile falters. She glances at the field, eyes automatically seeking out Sam – and there she is, running in circles around a girl from the other team: her daughter's idea of guarding.

“I know that guy,” he murmurs.

“What? Who?” Amanda now sees he isn't actually looking at the field, but across it. She searches the sidelines and locates a blond man standing with his arms crossed over his chest, staring steely-eyed back at them. “What, Beach Boy over there? You know him?”

Before he can respond, Sam lets out a loud cry, and they are both distracted. Their daughter is on the ground further down the field, a little boy with sandy hair standing awkward over her, looking around like he wants to run for it. Amanda is pretty sure Sam just fell down but—

“C'mon Ref,” Daniel suddenly shouts, “Didn't you see – there's no tackling! No tackling!”

“Uh, Daniel?” Amanda begins uncertainly.

And then her normally collected, wry-humored business partner explodes forward from the sidelines. She is so startled, she doesn't even think to try to pull him back. She watches, bemused, as he jogs forward.

His words can be heard from clear across the field. “Are you going to disqualify that kid?” he demands. “That was an illegal—”

The blond man from the other team joins them. “How about you relax, LaRusso, it was an accident. The grass is wet, and the kids aren't exactly wearing cleats.”

Daniel's hair is actually flapping with his agitation. “Accident? Really. You expect me to believe that, when I saw you coaching him just a minute ago.”

“He's my _son_. I think I'm allowed to talk to my son – Ref, can we just get back to the game—”

“Oh, and I suppose you were the one who taught him that slide tackle.”

The man's smirk could be seen from one hundred yards away. “Eh, see a good move once, you like to be able to pass it on to the next generation, you know?”

The mother in the team tracksuit steps up to Amanda, eyebrows raised. “Some parents get too heated about these things,” she confides, shaking her head. “ _Men_. Right?”

Amanda stares at her wordlessly and then back at the field, where the referee is now threatening to ask both men to leave the game. She takes a sip of her thermos and wishes she had something stronger.


	2. Chapter 2

“Did you seriously almost just get into a fight with a college student, Johnny,” says Shannon, waiting for him back on the sidelines after the referee has summarily dismissed him. “When you said you were going to coach Robby's team, I was – pleasantly surprised, don't get me wrong. But if you're going to treat this whole thing like a chance to throw down with every single—”

“I'm not,” he says. “Jesus, how about a little benefit of the doubt here?”

“You got into a fight three weeks ago. You showed up to dinner with a black eye – hey, honey,” she says, abruptly switching tones. She kneels down as Robby runs up. “You did great out there, look at you go!”

Robby looks nervously up at him. “That girl cried,” he says uncertainly.

Johnny waves a hand. “That's what soccer players do. Don't worry about it.”

“But the other coach was upset.” How does even a six-year-old not believe him?

“The other coach is whiner,” says Johnny, bending down. “Here, give me five and then go back out there and kick some more ass. There's still ten minutes left in this scrimmage, and we want to end strong, don't we?” Robby hesitantly slaps his hand, his eyes flickering back to Shannon like he needs permission.

Johnny claps him on the back and pushes him to the field. When he straightens, he meets her eyes and says, nodding across the field to where he can feel Daniel LaRusso burning a hole through his denim jacket, “I know him. Knew, whatever.”

She follows his gaze. “Who, the intern?”

“Yeah, he's the first guy I ever... you know.”

“Beat up?”

“No,” he has no idea who that would be, “he's – you know, the other thing.” There's no one within earshot, but he still doesn't think talking about gay shit at a kiddie soccer game is a good idea.

Shannon's eyebrows shoot up. “Jesus, Johnny, you cradle robber. Was he ten at the time?”

“What?” His face twists. “ _No_. He's older than me.”

“Bullshit, he barely looks old enough to drink.”

It's an exaggeration, but not much of one. Daniel is improbably boyish for a – fuck, he's gotta be almost forty.

Which is to say, he looks good. Even staring at him over a ref's cautionary arm, disbelief and shock and outrage in his eyes – well, who's Johnny kidding, all that just made it better.

He lets himself look one more time across to the other sideline, where the other man has his arms folded across his chest and is staring back. He can't help his smirk, or how it grows when he sees Daniel's head shake slightly.

Ten minutes left in the scrimmage game and then the youth soccer association season opening picnic. Maybe this day won't be as boring as he thought.


	3. Chapter 3

He's at a table loading up three plates with lukewarm chili and potato salad when Daniel finds him. He looks up from a foil tray of soggy fried chicken and there he is: hands in pockets, watching Johnny.

“Johnny Lawrence.” His voice has mellowed; there's still a bit of Jersey there, but only if you know to listen for it. “Been a long time. And look at you, you still got the,” he gestures upwards, but does not specify. He shakes his head slightly, mouth indenting like he's biting his cheek.

Johnny can play it cool, because he was born cool.

“Bet you were surprised to see me,” he says easily. He points at him with a chicken wing. “You look good, man. I mean – it's a Saturday morning and you're dressed like an accountant, but. Yeah.”

You got a little taller, he doesn't add. Man knows his own height, doesn't need to be told.

“You too. Still uh – keeping active, I see.” Daniel's scratches his jaw, eyes darting over him and away again.

“I help teach karate down at the Y.”

Surprise from Daniel, which he tries not to read into. “Really?”

“Yeah, trying to save up to open my own dojo, but I don't know – rent in the area's really climbing. Everyone wants to open a fucking coffee shop and host poetry slams.”

Daniel's mouth twitches. “Yeah, yeah. I hear you. We've been trying – Amanda and I,” he explains, gesturing over to a brunette babe sitting at another picnic table with the crybaby from before, “we've been looking for a good location to open a small dealership. But it's tricky, and y'know, some people say there's a bubble, maybe this isn't the best time....”

“Bubble, right,” says Johnny, nodding. He has no idea what Daniel is talking about, but what else is new.

The situation is becoming insupportably stranger by the second, and they both seem to realize it at the same moment. All the times over the years Johnny had idly imagined bumping into him again, trading small talk about commercial rent hadn't figured into the picture. Man, sometimes being an adult really blows.

“Well, I guess I should,” he begins, shifting back, but Daniel interrupts quickly.

“So you have a son?” And he points again at the other picnic table. “That's my daughter Sam. Just turned six.”

“Robby, yeah.” He glances around to do some pointing of his own, but he doesn't see them. “He's with his mom somewhere around here. I told them not to go far, got three damn plates to carry.”

“I can help with that.”

Johnny squints at him. “You want to carry my food?”

“Relax, Johnny,” he says, suddenly sounding much more like the prick he remembers. “It's potluck food, not a stack of textbooks. No need to go reading into things.” He smiles. “Maybe I want to see what kind of interesting lady would marry you.”

Johnny shoves two of the plates towards his chest, and Daniel's hands come up to avert a potato salad collision with his button-down. He expression twitches, but he hangs onto his smile.

“We're not married,” says Johnny and starts walking.

Daniel hurries around the table and catches up to him. “That's very modern of you,” he says neutrally. “So does that mean you're separated or—”

Johnny scans the park, looking for Robby's thatch of straw hair, trying to remember what color top Shannon had been wearing that morning. “It's an on and off thing. More – off, than on, these past couple years.” He gives him a suspicious look. “Jesus, you're nosy. How long's it been, and you're interrogating me within five minutes?”

Daniel's eyebrows lift: almost, but not quite, insulting. “This is pretty basic small talk, I don't know what your problem is.”

It doesn't feel basic. It feels very pointed. “Well, how about you, then? You got the kid, the wife and the not-a-dealership—”

“Ex-wife,” says Daniel.

Johnny slows and stops. He turns and they look at each other over their armful of rapidly cooling food. Daniel looks perfectly bland, the only sign of anything being the way he doesn't blink as he meets Johnny's eyes.

“And now you're coaching youth soccer,” says Johnny. “Sounds like a very fulfilling life. Congrats.”

Johnny's forgotten more things than he probably ever knew in the first place, but he's never forgotten how just the sight of this particular smile from Daniel LaRusso made him feel like he was circling with someone on a mat. To see it again after so long is almost disorienting, like being hit with déjà vu tenfold. _You've done this before_ , says the feeling, even though Johnny knows he hasn't. The last time he saw this guy was a lifetime ago. He doesn't even really know him.

Daniel's eyes shift over his, like he's rifling around, looking for something. “You don't sound like you've done too shabby yourself, Coach Lawrence.”

“I haven't,” he says. If he tells himself this regularly, it's gotta start feeling true at some point.

“Dad!” calls Robby from a distance. Johnny breaks the gaze and looks around, finally spying the pair over under a maple tree. Robby stands on the bench of the picnic table and waves his arm. “Over here!”

Johnny looks at Daniel, who has subsided back into his accountant face. Daniel smiles ahead at the table and glances back to him.

“Should be an interesting season,” he says, and starts walking again, like he can just go introduce himself to Johnny's family out of the blue. After a couple seconds, Johnny's brain kicks back in and he strides after him.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks, staring at the neatly combed dark head of hair, _he's still a complete freak.  
_


	4. Chapter 4

“Hi, I'm Daniel,” he's saying as Johnny catches up. Daniel sets the two plates down on the table and offers his hand to Shannon. “I went to high school with Johnny.”

“Shannon Keene,” she says, because she always makes sure to let people know she still has her maiden name. Her eyes slide to Johnny's as she takes the proffered hand; her tone is not withholding judgment so much as saving it for when she can spew it forth in private later on.

Johnny sighs internally and straddles the bench beside Robby. He takes an aggressive bite of his chicken. Perhaps if he pretends he doesn't notice this is happening, it won't be.

“And this skilled little striker must be Robby,” says Daniel, in that same friendly voice. He turns to the boy, who is poking a piece of potato salad and wrinkling his nose. At Daniel's mention of his name, he looks up solemnly and asks:

“Is the girl okay?”

Daniel blinks. His smile goes a little fluid, more genuine, and he says, “Who, Sam? Yeah, she's a tough nut to crack. Don't worry about it.”

Johnny ruffles Robby's hair and says, “Eat up, food's not getting any warmer.”

Shannon says, “So, Daniel, you're – coaching this year, I take it? Does that mean you used to play too?”

Johnny looks at her, because she damn well knows he did. Daniel notices the look, and says, “Yeah, me and Johnny were on the team together senior year.” His eyes stay on Johnny as he continues, “We went to the playoffs and everything, but I got injured and, well.” His hands flick out. “Team kinda fell apart after that.”

“We played the number one seed first round,” Johnny tells Shannon. “That team went on to win State. There were a lot of factors involved in that loss.”

“I really don't care,” she replies brightly, looking between them.

Daniel puts his hands in his pockets and looks around the park. “So I hear your team's going to be using the practice grounds here too. Some problem with the old park in Reseda?”

“Eh, yeah,” says Johnny, around a mouthful of chili. “They say they found heavy metals or something in the soil. EPA made a big deal about shutting it down for the year as they dig everything up. Don't know why it would take so long. I mean, how hard can it be to find metal and take it out?”

Shannon nods in agreement. They've had this conversation several times.

Daniel presses his lips together, seemingly at a loss for words. It doesn't last long, unfortunately.

He takes his hands out of his pockets to clap. “Right, well! There's plenty of room in this park, obviously. Just make sure you're not stealing my plays, hey?”

And he punches Johnny lightly in the shoulder, like they're surf bros down at the beach. He's been like four different people since the moment Johnny first noticed him standing across the field, and it's as unsettling as it is exhausting.

Johnny looks down at his shoulder. He looks up at Daniel. “Ha, ha,” he says, nonplussed. “Right.”

But Daniel is impervious to his expression. He smiles again at Shannon and Robby and says, “I'm sure I'll see you guys later. Enjoy the food.”

Shannon's smile lasts for as long as it takes for Daniel to get out of earshot, and then she reaches across the table to cup her hands over Robby's ears and hiss, “What the _fuck_ was that, Johnny?”

He shrugs.


	5. Chapter 5

He is at his worktable, peering through a magnifying glass and carefully starting to tie off a spinnerbait, when Daniel comes storming through the door. He is already pulling off his jacket and casting it aside, rolling up his sleeves, all the while talking, talking: high spirits of some variety. Been a long time.

“I just can't believe it,” says Daniel. “I mean. It's not exactly what I expected.”

He has no idea what Daniel is talking about. As he usually does in such situations, he decides to play it cool.

Miyagi was born cool.

“How was game?” he asks, and does not look up from the spinnerbait. Delicate work in a delicate state; hard-headed Daniel best left waiting sometimes.

“The ga— oh, it was fine. Or rather, I should say,” Daniel's waving his arms: _very_ long time, “Sam fell down and cried, and then got angry about having cried in front of her team, and then they lost the scrimmage. She's fine though. I'm not sure how we're supposed to keep up with her emotions when she has like five a minute.”

Miyagi, safely bent over his magnifying glass, allows his mouth to twitch into a smile.

Daniel sighs and crosses the room. He flops down in his customary chair on the other side of the worktable. He stares at him expectantly. “But did you hear what I said, before? About who was coaching the other kids' team?”

Miyagi draws a thread through a loop and hums questioningly. He turns the spinnerbait to examine it as he waits.

“It was Johnny Lawrence,” says Daniel flatly.

Miyagi looks up from the spinnerbait.

Daniel turns the chair idly with his foot and shakes his head, staring up at the ceiling. His hair is standing a little from having dragged his hands through it on the way over here. “You remember him, right? My first All Valley? The final? God, I can't believe it. And you should've seen him. He was so – well. You know, he says he teaches karate now? Yeah, down at the Y. He's got a kid and he's teaching karate.”

Miyagi pushes his chair back from the worktable and stands. Old bones slower now, so every movement must be more deliberate.

“I swear, I _swear_ he was exactly the same. Like older, obviously, but _exactly_ the same. Same dumb smirk. Same little squint. Even his hair is still blond! What kind of man stays blond into his thirties, anyway?”

Miyagi heads for kitchen.

Behind him: “Hey, Mr. Miyagi, are you listening? Where you going?”

He lifts a hand without looking back. “I put on tea.” And get sake.

Been a long time. He knows how that goes.


	6. Chapter 6

Between the scrimmage and all the food and the subsequent playing with the other kids in the park, Robby's falling asleep by the time they pull up to Shannon's building. So Johnny parks in the loading zone, hits his flashers, and carries his son up to the apartment.

It's not something he got to do very often when Robby was little, and less and less frequently as the months wore on this past year. The little arms looped around his neck already feel longer than they'd been the last time.

“Do kids his age usually still nap?” he asks Shannon, watching a spit bubble form around Robby's mouth in the elevator mirror. Don't get on his shirt, don't get on his shirt.... “You don't think he's one of those narco cases or something, do you?”

Shannon looks up from digging her keys out of her purse. “It was a big day, and he's six.”

“He's played soccer before,” he says, following her out into the hallway. It smells faintly of cigarettes and mildew, probably because the carpeting hasn't been replaced since the early nineties. He notices Shannon giving him a look and says, “What?”

“He was worried about letting his dad down.”

“He could never let me down,” he says. She smiles. “I mean, like you said, he's six.”

She rolls her eyes and lets them into the apartment.

Johnny heads directly to the small bedroom just off the living room. He hitches the boy up with one arm while pulling the blanket free and then lays him down on the bed.

Robby resists letting go for a couple seconds, and Johnny blinks at nothing, bites his tongue. He reaches up and carefully tugs the arms from around his neck. Robby's eyes slit open.

“Hey,” he says awkwardly, thinking of what Shannon said. “You did real good today, striker.”

Robby shuffles around to lie on his side. “Will you be here when I wake up?” he asks quietly.

Shit. “No,” he says, like ripping off a band-aid, “but I'll be seeing you at practice in a couple days, remember? You and me, we're going to have a whole season of fun together.”

He can't tell if this means anything to the kid. Do six-year-olds have any understanding of the future? Or is he basically talking to a goldfish with floppy blond hair right now?

He draws the blankets up over the boy and lamely pats his forehead. “Go ahead, sleep like a champ. You earned it.”

In the other room, Shannon has poured herself a glass of white wine. There is a beer waiting for him at the end of the counter, and he gratefully swipes; cracks; swigs.

“So,” she says, watching him. “Are you going to rebound from me with that Eddie Bauer catalog twink, or what?”

He drains the beer in one long pull. He sets it back down on the counter and says, “Who says I haven't already rebounded from you?”

“Oh, please,” she says to his retreating back. “Like that dick's seen any action in half a year.”  
  


* * *

Johnny picks up a twelve pack at the store around the corner from his place and lets himself sink into his Saturday night.

He gets through over half of it before something drives him up from his armchair in front of the television and into his bedroom, to his closet, the cardboard box he's carted around since after the funeral and Sid told him to come get the rest of his things if he didn't want them thrown in the garbage and god, the man was a prick, Johnny was half in the bag when he went through his mom's stuff that day, barely seeing what he was grabbing, couldn't stand to look at any of it, touch it, because it all felt so fake now: stuff only a mom would keep, and once she's gone so is any value in that ticket stub, that drawing, that weird little GI Joe action figure he barely remembered playing with.

He finds the team photo from senior year soccer and falls heavily back on his ass, shoving the box back into the depths of the closet without looking at it.

His eyes find himself first: standing next to Bobby in the back row, staring ahead at the camera like it was a rifle squad. Bobby's hair is funny; Johnny squints, trying to find signs of it thinning even then, but the resolution in a 1980s school camera doesn't really allow for such scrutiny.

Daniel LaRusso is kneeling in the front row, with the rest of the shorter players. He's not-quite smiling, and he has a black eye.

Johnny scrapes himself off the floor and carries the photo back into the other room, slapping at the kitchen switch so he can look at it under proper light.

He doesn't remember the day the photo was taken, is the thing. If this was early on in the season, if the bruising marring the boy's face was from Johnny's own fist or Dutch and the others later on. Johnny's eyes trace Daniel's grainy expression, like he might find some hint in it.

Fuck, he thinks. Fuck.

He crosses to the wall beside the fridge and grabs the phone; he listens to the dial tone while staring at the numbers blankly and then hangs it back up. He opens another beer, looks at the photo again.

Halfway through the beer, he remembers the stack of yellow bags sitting on the concrete outside. Every year another one is delivered.

He yanks open his apartment door and looks down at the stack. Grabs the top one, letting the yellow plastic bag drift down to the ground; peers at the cover of the 2007 Los Angeles County phone book. It's thick, heavy enough to slap someone with and do some real damage.

He kicks the door closed again and crosses back to the island of light in the kitchen. Photo under his left elbow, nose practically brushing the book, he finally gets past the yellow pages and finds the names under L.

He carries the phone book to the wall and stabs the right number into the dial pad. It takes him two attempts and then the phone rings.

And rings.

And rings.

And—

“You have reached the LaRussos: Amanda, Daniel, and Sam!” says a woman. “Sorry we're unable to reach the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, we'll get right back to you.”

The answering machine beeps. Johnny drops the phone book on the floor and says, “Daniel.”


	7. Chapter 7

Johnny rolls up to the first practice three afternoons later and ten minutes late to find his assistant coach lying on the ground in front of the assembled team. He walks to stand over the man, who startles slightly at the appearance of a pair of hairy muscular legs directly over his head.

“John,” he says, sitting up hurriedly.

“Coach Lawrence is just fine, Coach Martin,” he says, folding his arms.

Coach Martin laughs a little nervously. “Oh? I'm not – I mean, I just said I'd help out here and there because I'm in between jobs, I'm not really much of a—”

“What are they doing right now,” says Johnny, gesturing at the kids wriggling around the grass. He takes off his sunglasses for effect but the sun is painfully bright, so he quickly puts them back on.

Coach Martin looks around. “Stretching?”

“U7 soccer players don't need to stretch,” says Johnny. “At this age their muscles are like fresh rubber bands.”

“I don't think that's—”

“Quiet.” He turns to face his ragged mass of earthworms and shouts, “Players! On your feet!”

And, when the kids are too slow following that direction, he reaches for his new favorite possession. The piercing shriek of the whistle hurries everyone along, including his assistant coach. Robby is already standing; Johnny winks at him and gives a subtle thumbs-up. He doesn't want to show favoritism, but it's already clear his son is the best on the team.

Coach Martin shoves his glasses up his nose and looks between Johnny and the kids. Something catches his eye and he tilts his head to squint at the whistle resting against Johnny's white T-shirt. “Take back the night,” he reads.

“They were giving them away free at the health clinic. Useful, right?” Martin makes no reply and Johnny says to the kids, “Okay, there's not gonna be anymore of this stretching nonsense. That's for game days only, got it? Make it look good for the parents.” He paces and Coach Martin steps quickly out of his path. “This summer we're focusing on one and one thing only. Can any of you guess what that is?”

The array of six- and seven-year-olds fidget. Near the front, a gawky, awkward boy with an unfortunate bowl cut tentatively raises a hand. Johnny points at him.

“Having fun?” he says.

Coach Martin smiles and the boy smiles back. Both smiles drop when Johnny barks: “No. Wrong. Anyone else?”

No one else.

Johnny walks over to the bag of beach balls he'd brought from his car. Sixteen sets of eyes follow him as he drags the net bag in front of the group and drops it. He looks around and says, “Ball control.”  
  


* * *

  
The first couple times he throws a ball at a kid, they either catch it, get hit, or duck, which only hardens his belief in this course of action.

“No,” he calls, blowing his whistle and making everyone within ten feet wince. “No hands! This ball comes at you, you trap it with your head, your chest – anything but the hands. Go again. We're going to do this until you all understand that in soccer, hands do not exist.” He nods to Coach Martin, who tentatively underhands a ball to the next kid in line.

“Uh, Johnny?”

He looks around quickly, whistle still pinched between his teeth. Daniel is standing ten feet back, eyes traveling over the kids. He's wearing black tracksuit bottoms and a gray polo shirt with sleeves that are just a little too long to show off his arms. Somehow he looks good anyway.

He spits out his whistle and walks over. “LaRusso. Trying to steal state secrets?”

“Not as such.” He looks around. “What are you doing? I don't remember this drill in the guidebook.”

“Who needs a guidebook? I came up with this one on my own.”

Daniel looks like he wants to say something about that, but in the end he only rubs his mouth with a knuckle and takes a breath. “Listen, this is – strange. But did you call my ex-wife's house on Saturday? Leave a message?”

Johnny hangs onto his smile and thanks his hangover that he's still wearing the sunglasses. “Your – ex-wife's house?” Daniel nods, eyes narrow. “Ah.” Fuck. He shakes his head slowly, like he's thinking about it carefully, searching his memory. Fuck fuck fuck. “...Nope. Don't think so.”

Daniel's head goes back a little. He is not buying a second of this. “Really?” He folds his arms over his chest, and if that shirt's sleeves were just two inches shorter.... “You didn't call at one-thirty in the morning, mumbling something about soccer and high school, apologizing for pushing me around? That was someone else?”

“Oh – that message,” he says, because he knows when he's beat. He snaps his fingers. “Yeah, yes. That was me.”

Daniel nods. “Oh, just remembered that, huh?”

They smile sarcastically at each other.

Daniel steps in close, voice lowering, and see, this is some serious mixed messages for Johnny, because Daniel's eyes keep moving over him one way, but his mouth is saying, sounding kinda pissed:

“The thing is, Amanda didn't really know about the soccer, or the bullying, or any of that. So aside from the extreme _weirdness_ of another parent coach calling up in the middle of the night to drunkenly apologize, she's now asking me all sorts of awkward questions about stuff I haven't thought about in twenty years. So thanks for that, Johnny. Really. Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” he says.

Daniel's eyebrows shoot up and his chin jerks slightly. “You've got some nerve," he breathes.

He sighs, “Look, it was a misunderstanding—”

Daniel's finger stabs his solar plexus. “Misunderstanding, _bullshit_. I told you we were divorced, and that same night you call up the number in the phone book? Are you trying to fuck with me again, is that what this is?”

Johnny pushes his sunglasses up to his forehead. He glances around at the kids – not catching the balls anymore, good – and back at Daniel, who looks incensed.

“I have a simple solution here,” he says calmly.

Daniel spreads his hands. “Can't wait to hear it.”

“Give me your new number.”

And Johnny thinks it would've been a really smooth moment, if not for Robby, who not only traps the beach ball thrown his way, but heads it straight over Coach Martin's head into the side of Daniel's face.


	8. Chapter 8

Daniel is red in the face and several children are giggling.

“Alright, alright,” says Johnny, waving his arms to indicate they need to shut the hell up. “Coach Martin, why don't you uh, go lead the team in some jumping jacks.”

Coach Martin glances between Johnny and Daniel and wisely obeys. Robby lingers behind, looking nervous. His hands tangle together, the very picture of guilt.

“That was some header,” says Johnny to him, halfway between placating and congratulating. He can almost feel Daniel's glare burning into the side of his face. He adds, “But it's important to be aware one's surroundings at all times in soccer.” There, that sounded good.

Robby looks down and mumbles, “He was angry.”

Johnny rubs his back. “Hey, Robby, it's – wait,” he says, pausing, something like glee dawning, “are you saying you _aimed_ that ball?”

Daniel directs a baleful eye on him, jaw shifting. He hurriedly turns his son towards the group now doing jumping jacks and pushes him at them, whispering quickly in his ear, “You're awesome.”

When Robby is safely away, he asks Daniel, “How's the face?”

He narrows his eyes, like he suspects Johnny is making fun of him. “It was a beach ball hit by small child. I'm fine.”

Hell yeah, you are, Johnny doesn't say. He scratches at his stubble and Daniel stares at him. The children's chorus counting off their jumping jacks fills the silence between them: _ten! ee-lev-en! twelve!  
_

“So about that number,” begins Johnny.

“I have a practice to run,” says Daniel, turning on his heel.

“Alright, man,” Johnny calls after him. Daniel swats the air without looking back, like he could slap down his words. “Catch you Thursday, maybe.” He watches him go for a couple appreciative seconds (hips) and then turns to regard his team.

“What the hell?” he says.

Coach Martin has stopped doing jumping jacks and is bent over, hands on knees and breathing heavily. About half the kids, thinking this is some kind of new exercise, are trying to copy him.

Johnny shakes his head. He raises his whistle to his lips and blows. Hard.  
  


* * *

  
The practices aren't suppose to overlap, the park not being that big to begin with, so fifteen minutes later finds Johnny sitting in his car, Robby in the passenger seat. He's bought him an ice cream from a passing truck to keep him occupied while Johnny peers out his window at LaRusso's team.

Daniel doesn't have an assistant coach. He wastes ten minutes leading his kids in stretching, and then starts them on basic dribbling form.

“Oh man,” says Johnny shaking his head, “they are gonna lose so bad.”

“Who is?” asks Robby. He has ice cream all over his face. Johnny absently fishes into his cupholder for a napkin. He hands it to him and says:

“The competition, Robby. The competition.” Johnny supposes he can't see over the dashboard. And on the tail of that thought: “...Are you supposed to still be riding in the backseat?”

Robby looks up from the crumpled napkin and shrugs.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam's dad is behaving weird.

They've been sitting in the car forever. Before that he drove in circles in the parking lot over and over, which was at least kind of fun, but now they are just sitting there. And she's finished her coloring pages and she doesn't want to read the book beside her on the seat, and they've been sitting there. Forever.

She leans forward against her seatbelt. “Dad.”

“Mm?”

“I'm bored. Can we go home?”

“Yeah, soon, honey.” He doesn't look away from his window, and he's chewing on his thumbnail like Mom always told her she wasn't allowed to do.

Sam unbuckles her seatbelt and gets up on her knees in the backseat so she can look out the window too. She squints around the parking lot, but it's just a bunch of cars sitting in front of a large blocky building.

“Dad.”

“Yeah, Sam?”

“What are we looking for?”

He sighs. “The enemy, Sam. We're looking for the enemy. But I think I have the wrong YMCA.”

She folds her hands over the lip of the door and sets her chin down, pressing her nose to the window. Her breath fogs the glass and she crosses her eyes to drag a finger through it.

“Did you trying calling?" she asks. "Mom always tells you to try calling.”

“Yes, I tried calling. But they got – weird about it. Man at the desk was one of those civil liberty paranoid nut jobs, told me to get a warrant just for asking a simple question about their employees.”

“What's a civil liberty paranoid nut job?” she asks curiously, tongue stumbling a little over the big words.

Her dad glances over his shoulder at her, expression weird. “Never mind. Hey, Sam, maybe get back in your seat and buckle up.”

She perks up. “Are we going home?”

He looks back to the parking lot, mouth pursing. He sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, I'm taking you home.”


	10. Chapter 10

Johnny shaves and showers before Thursday's practice. He spends five minutes in front of the mirror trying to comb his hair before realizing he looks like Robby at Shannon's cousin's baptism a year ago.

“The hell,” he mutters and quickly drags his hands through it in a rough toweling motion. Now he looks like he's been fucked head-first into a front-loading dryer. Finally he jams a Dodgers hat on his head and calls it good.

Practice starts out strong. He has the kids kick balls around cones for twenty minutes while breaking down his game plan for the final drill with Coach Martin.

“I thought soccer wasn't really a contact sport,” is his only feedback. He keeps glancing at the kids, looking faintly worried or something.

“All real sports are contact sports, if you're doing them right.”

“Okay, but Krissy – that's my wife, she said—”

“This'll be great, don't worry about it.” He blows his whistle and calls out, “Alright, I want two lines facing each other, hustle up!”

There are fifteen kids, so Johnny gestures at Robby to stand opposite him. It's not favoritism if there's an odd number.

As Coach Martin glumly distributes the soccer balls down the line, Johnny explains the drill.

“Those of you without the ball, I want you to run as hard as you can at the other player. The goal here is to come back with possession. There will be no flinching like babies, no running away. Use any means necessary – except your hands. Actually, I want all of you to lock your hands behind your back. Do it, do it... good. Alright. Everybody ready?”

The kids chorus back a variety of responses, which he doesn't really listen to.

“Good.” He blows his whistle again. “Go!”

What happens next isn't exactly the battle in Braveheart, but he can see some of his kids have the right spirit, at least.

He turns to his son and nudges the ball in place between his own feet. For Robby's benefit, he even puts his hands behind his back. He meets his eyes. “Ready?”

Robby doesn't respond, but charges gamely at him. Johnny tussles lightly for the ball, half bent over and not trying to do much of anything except keep it ever so slightly out of his reach. His son's got moves, though, and doesn't give up. After about thirty seconds he runs clear around Johnny and, while he's turning, kicks the ball through his legs. It goes bouncing ten feet away.

“Good job, look at that,” he laughs. “Quick thinking.”

Robby shifts on his feet and grins a little.

Johnny jogs over to get the ball, nudging it up onto his laces and kicking it into the air, catching it. When he looks up, he sees Daniel.

Daniel and his daughter are sitting over on the swings on the other side of the field, drinking soft drinks through straws. They're both wearing sunglasses and serious expressions, and they're watching him.

Johnny spins the ball between his hands and watches them thoughtfully back. A couple seconds later, Coach Martin comes over.

“So we have a couple scraped knees and maybe a bruise or two, but it wasn't as bad as I,” he says, before trailing off, noticing the direction of Johnny's gaze. “Oh, him again. What's with that guy, he seems kind of... intense.”

“You have no idea,” says Johnny with a slight laugh, tucking the ball under one arm. “Senior year of high school, he made my life a living hell.”

Comprehension floods Coach Martin's face. “I'm sorry,” he says sympathetically, reaching up to softly pat his shoulder. “Bullying's rough. It can have lifelong psychological effects, you know.”

Johnny checks his nod. “Oh. Really?”

“Nothing to be ashamed of – don't worry if it's all flooding back. All you need to remember is, you're not who you were then. Things are different now.” He straightens up, squaring his shoulders and looking narrowly over to where Daniel and his mini-me in braids are sitting. “If there's any trouble, I've got your back.”

He's not who Johnny would have expected or chosen for a wing man, but sure, okay. He slaps his back, wincing slightly as the slighter man rocks forward a little. He clears his throat. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”


	11. Chapter 11

On Friday, Johnny exits the employee locker room and finds himself facing Daniel not ten feet away. They stare at each other, each vying for who can look more surprised. The surprise quickly morphs into study; Johnny sees Daniel take in his black gi, while he tilts his head and admires the bare calves he hasn't seen in twenty years.

But then Daniel rocks back on his heels, like he's thinking of making a quick escape, so Johnny hurriedly strikes.

“You know,” he says, spreading his arms a little, “not for nothing, but if you'd given me your number, you wouldn't have follow me around everywhere.”

“I'm not following you around,” says Daniel, aggrieved. And when Johnny glances pointedly around the hallway, he adds, “I'll have you know, I've belonged to this Y for a while.”

“I've never seen you here.”

“My schedule changed after the divorce, fucking sue me, Johnny.”

“Okay, alright.” He puts his hands up, but can't fully bite back the grin. He gives him another quick once-over, noting the duffle bag over his shoulder. “You uh, coming or going?”

He hesitates. “I – just got here.”

“You know the men's changing rooms are down the other hallway, right? Since you been a member for a while and all.”

“Is that a question?” Eyes narrowing.

“Just saying, why wander down this way unless maybe you were looking for... someone.” Johnny smiles, closemouthed, even though Shannon always said it made him look like a jerk.

And maybe it does, because Daniel continues to look at him, completely unmoved. Finally he jerks his head slightly back down the hallway and says, “Girl at the desk said Roy was around, that I might catch him down this way if I hurried. Since his shift ends at two.”

Johnny's smile drops like an anvil. “Roy? Roy Barrett, _the_ _Zumba_ _guy_?”

Tight smile from Daniel. “I was thinking of getting some personal training in.”

He snorts. “Yeah. I bet.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Daniel's fist around the strap of his bag tightens.

“I mean, I don't know which I find harder to believe here, that you showed up right before my shift is supposed to start, or that Daniel LaRusso wants to pay some spandex-wearing gym bunny to tell him how to exercise.”

Daniel shrugs off his duffle bag and it lands heavily at their feet. He steps forward over it. “You don't know anything about me. Maybe spandex-wearing whatever the fuck you just said is exactly what I love to spend money on.”

Johnny crosses his arms, conscious it shows his biceps at their best. “Babe, I can put on spandex and tell you what to do with your body, if that's what you're into. Save you the fifty bucks.”

Daniel goes red and speechless for all of a second and then, with a sort of mangled fury: “What did you just say?”

“You heard me.” Johnny leans down, gets right up in his space, thrilling a little at how Daniel's eyes take him in. “Cmon, think about it. You're clearly already hot for it. I don't know, maybe the smell of chlorine and old jock straps in this hallway really gets your engine revving. Either that or you want this.”

But Daniel's expression abruptly relaxes slightly and goes oddly calculating. He says, almost smiling because he's a complete freak, “You're fucking with me. I knew it.”

Shit, he over-shot it with the trash talk. Johnny _always_ does this with men. “I mean, yeah, I'm kind of fucking with you, but to be absolutely _crystal clear_ here, man, I also want to fuck—”

“Um. Excuse me?” says some guy behind them.

They turn their heads together to stare at the fresh-faced twenty-something in slinky blue Under Armour standing a few feet away.

He smiles back at them, dimly confused. “Hi, sorry to interrupt – Diane said someone was asking for me?”

“And who are you?” snaps Daniel. His hair smells good, Johnny notices just then.

“Roy Barrett,” says the kid, but like he isn't so sure anymore.

Which is how Daniel ends up dropping seventy bucks on personal training while Johnny holds his karate class on the other side of the building.


	12. Chapter 12

“Anyway, so after that he blew me in the little room they set aside for nursing moms,” says Johnny, and across the table, Bobby explodes in a violent coughing fit. It's pretty funny for about ten seconds, but as the coughing doesn't stop and Bobby's face grows steadily more red and vein-y, Johnny gets worried.

He leans forward, hands hovering. “Shit, dude, are you choking? Do I need Heimlich you?”

Bobby pounds the table with a fist and, using a precious gasp of air, says hoarsely, “Think I inhaled a chip.”

Johnny shoves a tall glass of water at him. “Well, drink or something. Freaking me out like that, jesus.”

Bobby's tear-filled eyes glare at him over the rim of the water glass. When he is done, and the coughs have tapered off to little grunts and bouts of embarrassed throat-clearing, he demands, “Was _any_ of that true?”

Johnny slouches in the booth and drums his hands on the table. “Everything but the last part,” he says, a little regretfully. “LaRusso was long gone by the time my classes were over.”

Bobby shakes his head and mutters disparagingly under his breath about childhood friends. He busies himself wiping his eyes with a napkin while Johnny orders another round to make it up to him.

“So,” he says, when they both have fortifying pints in front of them. “What do you think? Honest opinion.”

“Honest opinion?” says Bobby. And when he nods: “I think you should really read the coaching guidebook. They write them for a reason – legal liability, to name a crucial one.”

“Not about my team,” he says, disgusted. “About this Daniel LaRusso situation.”

Bobby grimaces and takes a quick sip of his beer. “I was hoping you weren't going to say that. Look – Johnny, I don't know, maybe it's best to let the past be the past?”

This isn't what he was expecting. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, when's the last time you saw him? Before all this, I mean.”

“Prom night,” he says immediately. Beer goggles or no, the memory's pretty clear.

This isn't the answer Bobby is expecting. He pauses and then shakes his head slightly, holding up his palm. “I don't want to know. But like before that – that whole last semester? And the All Valley? I don't know, it was kinda messed up, man.”

Johnny shifts a little on the bench, uncomfortable. “Yeah, parts of it, I guess. But it's not like _I_ fucked his knee up.” Bobby stares at him. “Sorry.”

There are quiet for a few minutes; Johnny's good humor well-deflated and Bobby looking half-exasperated, half-regretful about it.

“So, has he changed much?” Bobby ventures when their glasses are half-empty.

He grabs a handful of chips from the center of the table and considers the question. “Well,” he says, crunching. “Physically, not a whole lot. And his temper's about the same – oh, don't look at me like that, Bobby. How much do _you_ remember of senior year, the guy was always easy to set off. But uh, yeah, I mean – he seems kinda uptight, tell you the truth. Like he needs to relax, or maybe just a good, hard—”

“I'm a Unitarian, not a saint.”

He laughs. “Alright, alright.”

“You said he was divorced?” And when Johnny nods: “Well, would you say he's... unhappy about it?”

Which isn't a question Johnny has asked himself before. He rubs the back of his neck and thinks. “I mean – I've only seen him a few times,” he defends. “And half those, I was dealing with a pack of first graders making a mess of soccer.”

Bobby waits. Johnny squints.

“So, what, you think I should....” he trails off significantly, hoping the other man will fill in the end. When he stubbornly doesn't, he trails back in, “...try to make him _happy_?” Sounds gay, he doesn't say. But still: “Lot of work for a hook-up, isn't it?”

Bobby's eyes roll up to the ceiling or God and he drains the rest of his pint in one long go. When he puts the glass back down, he meets his eyes and says, “Johnny, you're turning forty this year. You have a kid.”

Thanks for the reminder, jesus. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“So, do you want to be alone forever? Or do you want to build something?” Bobby slaps the table and slides out of the booth. “Okay, put a pin in that. I gotta take a leak.”

Johnny shakes his head at his departing back. Man makes _one_ profile on an online dating site and thinks he knows everything about relationships. Whatever.


	13. Chapter 13

Louie loves his cousin like a brother from another mother who happens to be his aunt. He's been in California for three months, and Daniel's let him stay at his apartment rent-free, only asking that Louie put the pull-out sofa back to rights every morning. That's family. He wants to give back in any way he can, which is why, when Daniel trudges in one Saturday afternoon looking all bummed out, Louie asks him about his feelings and shit. That is, he asks about the kids' soccer game.

“We – well, the kids, they won,” says Daniel, dropping his bag. He bends to untie his shoes and put them on the weird little shelf next to the door.

“Alright underdogs!” crows Louie from the sofa. And, when Daniel blinks over at him: “Weren't you playing some little rich pricks from Encino?”

Daniel straightens. “Louie, my team were the little rich pricks.” His face twists in a grimace. “Look, they're kids. Can we maybe wait until middle school before we bring their socioeconomic status up? It's peewee soccer, not a picket line.”

“You seem kinda down for a guy who just won, don't mind me saying.”

Daniel crosses the room and sinks down into the beanbag Louie brought with him from Jersey. He puts his head back and says to the ceiling, “The games are held back-to-back with the other team sharing the park. The coach and I have – history.”

A feud! He knew his cousin couldn't have gone completely Californian on him. Louie has a couple feuds back home that he misses like his left arm, if his left arm had been lost somehow.

“History,” he says casually, wanting to let the other guy lead. “What's that mean, history?”

Daniel tries to wave it off, like he isn't still glaring up into space and clearly picturing a head he'd like to kick in. “Nothing important. High school. Ancient.” Louie waits. “But, yeah, he's back and he's kind of messing with me.” Louie leans forward. “And I feel like I should do something to send a message, y'know, a message that he can't – mess with me anymore.”

“Slash his tires?” suggests Louie. “Sugar in his fuel tank?”

His brow crashes down and he twists in the beanbag to stare at him. “No. Louie, what are you – he's got a kid, you know.”

Louie doesn't really see what that has to do with anything. “Well, whatever you do, I think you should lean in _hard_. This could be good for you!”

Daniel's hands tighten in his lap. He looks a little hunted. “What do you mean?”

“It's just – no offense, cuz, but you've been a bit of downer these past couple months. A little feud could be just the thing to pick you right back up, set you to rights. It's only natural. It's the Italian way.”

“You shouldn't say stuff like that, Louie. It's offensive.” Daniel drags himself out of the beanbag with some difficulty – hard to get out of a beanbag smoothly; Louie prefers a tuck and roll, himself – and walks out of the room, shaking his head.

“You just need to hit back,” Louie calls. “You'll see how great it feels and – then you'll get it.”

Sometimes a good little feud is the only thing that can keep a man going in this crazy, mixed-up world. He's pretty sure he heard that somewhere.


	14. Chapter 14

Johnny wakes up the following Tuesday feeling like he has a new lease on life.

He doesn't have a hangover. The milk in his fridge says it's expired, but passes the smell test. He accidentally parked too close to the fire hydrant on the street out front last night, but his windshield wiper bears no ticket. The radio doesn't play a single commercial as he drives to his morning class at the Y, and keeps the streak up when he drives over to the park in the afternoon.

It's like god came along and said, never mind about that credit score, let's set you up with something sweet.

Then he sees Shannon and Daniel chatting in the park parking lot.  
  


* * *

  
“Dad!” says Robby as he walks up, “Look, I can do four in a row.” He bounces the soccer ball on his knee twice before losing control of it; Johnny ruffles his hair and says absently:

“That's great, striker.”

Shannon and Daniel are laughing. She's leaning back against the spoiler of her Camry, fingers tugging at the ends of her hair where it lay over her shoulder: classic flirting pose. _He_ 's got a hand on his waist and is gesturing in the distance at something while talking: Johnny doesn't know what that is. But he doesn't like it.

They glance over as he walks up, mirth settling.

“This is something,” says Johnny, looking between them. “Look at you two. Talking.”

“It's what adults do, John,” says Daniel, in a bizarre hearty tone. And, while Johnny is mouthing _John_ to himself in complete confusion, he turns and says: “I'll see you later, Shan. Great talking to you.”

His eyes skim indifferently over Johnny as he walks past, step unchecked.

“Shan?” says Johnny. “John? What the fuck just happened?”

“ _Johnny_ ,” she hisses. And, right: Robby. He glances back, but the boy's got his head down, concentrating on juggling the soccer ball.

He turns back to Shannon and raises his eyebrows urgently.

She tosses her hair. “Daniel and I are getting drinks later on. We have a lot in common, being single parents.”

“Neither of you are single parents. I'm _right here_ ,” and he waves his hands over his face for emphasis, in case she's suddenly lost the ability to differentiate. “And I'm pretty sure LaRusso doesn't even live with his kid, so that doesn't count either.” He stews for a couple seconds, turning in place again to stare after the other man. Why does he show up so early, if not to see Johnny? Does he just like parks, like some kind of creep? “So, what is this, like – some kind of girl's night out? You've decided to play fag hag? Or is this a date?”

“Does it make a difference?” she asks sweetly.

“Wait. Did he give you his number?” he demands. There's an old feeling simmering up, one he hasn't felt in a long time, and it's starting to throw his thoughts and priorities into chaos.

He can't believe he thought god liked him for a moment there.

“Which one of us are you jealous of right now?” she says. “Do you even know?”

“Does it make a difference?” he says.

He turns and picks Robby up without ceremony mid-juggle; the kid complains but climbs around his shoulders until he's comfortable. They walk the soccer ball over to the field, leaving behind the confusing world of adults for a while.


	15. Chapter 15

He has the kids play against each other in a mock game, mostly so he can stand on the sideline and grimly brood. It takes only ten minutes for Coach Martin to get nervous with his silence.

“Is this about the game Saturday?” he asks, “I know it's disappointing to lose, but I thought the kids did a great job.”

“Mm.”

“None of them grabbed the ball with their hands,” he says. “There's that. It's important to look on the bright side. For their sake, if nothing else.”

“Mm.” Johnny blinks out of his funk. He looks at his assistant coach. “What was that thing you said last week, about not being a pussy anymore?”

Coach Martin's smile falters. “I don't think I – I didn't—”

Johnny spun his hand in the air like a wheel. “You know, you were saying all this crap about how things are different now?”

His expression clears with great relief. “Oh, yes. I said, it's important to remember you are not who were then. The past does not have to repeat itself.” Coach Martin looks around. “Has that guy come back?”

“No,” says Johnny, with steely resolve. “But he will.”  
  


* * *

  
That night, after he's had a couple, or a few, or whatever, he tries calling Shannon. Thinking: I'll interrupt this not-a-date shit, at least. Serve them both right.

He doesn't know which drives him more crazy, the idea they're out in a bar somewhere talking about him, or that they're _not_. What if they're getting along like old friends? What if their eyes meet over the table and sparks fly and suddenly her panties are around her ankle and Daniel's giving it to her in the bathroom? What if they get _married_ – is Johnny obligated to show up to the wedding, to like, give her away? The holidays will be so shitty. Fuck LaRusso if he thinks he gets to carve the turkey. Johnny's never carved a turkey in his life, but he bets he can do a better job.

He gets to the phone before he remembers the only number he knows is for the landline she had disconnected at the beginning of the year.

Stymied but not giving up, he goes to his fridge, to the sticky he had with her new mobile number. But the sticky's long gone. After a long and thorough search on his hands and knees, he finds it under the fridge: dust-covered, discolored and stiff from mystery (beer) stains that have made the ink run and bleed.

He slumps against the wall by the phone again, sticky note in hand, and tries a couple guesses for the number. After three hang-ups and one too-eager old man who tries to keep him on the line, he crumples the note and throws it in the trash.

She always calls him. He never really thought about it before, but she's always the one to call him.

He has another beer and thinks.

It hits him: the tracfone.

She bought him a tracfone last Christmas. He ran out of minutes after a month and didn't bother figuring out how to add more. He was secretly relieved, because he was really sick of having to charge the damn thing; you don't have to charge a normal phone, why do people put up with this shit? How is it more convenient?

Last he saw the little Motorola, he'd thrown it in his sock drawer and happily forgot about it. He goes and digs through it now, and is so triumphant when he fishes the phone out, he spends a few minutes doing a victory lap of the apartment before he remembers he threw the charger out.


	16. Chapter 16

The next day at work, he sees Daniel's Audi at the Y, carefully parked equidistant between the lines and well away from the other cars in the lot, like he's afraid it'll catch rust spots or something if he's too close to anyone.

He's not a kid anymore, Johnny tells himself, twirling his keys around his finger idly. He doesn't have to put up with any of LaRusso's crazy mind games. It can be different this time.

He has fifteen minutes before his first class. He goes hunting.  
  


* * *

  
“Hey, Diane,” he says, leaning over the front counter on his elbows and giving her his most charming smile. She stares back stonily, because she's homophobic. “Did a Daniel LaRusso check in this morning?”

“Do you have a warrant?” she asks.

“A war– Diane, I work here. I don't need a warrant.” He straightens up in disgust. “I don't think the cops need a warrant, even. I'm just asking if you've seen him. He's got dark hair, about this tall.... No? Nothing? If I promise to go to your church, would you tell me?”

She turns away with a stack of files held to her chest, nose up in the air. “Jonathan, I don't want you at my church unless it's to attend the AA meetings they hold in the basement.”

He rolls his eyes and gives up.

“Second Saturday of every month!” she calls after him down the hallway.  
  


* * *

  
He tries the weight rooms, the track, the changing rooms. Finally, he thinks to check the pool.

And there he is: tanned arms cutting a path in the water for his lean body to winnow through. He's going at a pretty good clip, too.

Johnny toes his shoes off, stuffs his socks into them, and walks along the edge of the pool until he's standing next to the diving block at the deep end. He sits seiza and watches the other man approach up the lane.

Daniel only notices him two feet out from the end, and in his shock he stops kicking. He immediately sinks like a stone.

Johnny bends forward over the pool and watches with interest as the wobbly dark-headed figure kicks off the bottom of the pool and surges up. He breaks the surface of the water with a gasp and a cough, arm flailing out blindly for the wall.

Johnny clasps his hand and pulls him to it. He doesn't let go even after Daniel's safely clinging to the wall.

Daniel kicks gently, treading water. He fumbles with his free hand and pulls his goggles down around his neck. He is breathing hard from the laps and the whole almost-drowning thing he just did; when he stares up at him with those big, brown eyes, he looks more vulnerable than Johnny's seen him since he was eighteen.

“You should be more careful. You know there's no lifeguard on duty, right?” says Johnny. He watches as the other man blinks and tries to rebuild his mask.

Daniel licks his lips and shakes his head again, like he might have water in his ears or something. He bobs in the water and says, “What are you doing? Why are you – what are you doing in here?”

Johnny had planned to come on strong, to push and insist until Daniel snapped, but this plan goes out the window in the face of a wet and mostly naked opposition. This was, of course, Daniel LaRusso's superpower. You get ready to kick his ass, and then he looks at you like he's never had a spiteful or dickish thought in his whole life; you let your guard down, and then he strikes.

Case in point:

Johnny says, conscious he is still holding the man's hand: “I want to ask you out. Like, on a date.”

And Daniel, apparently also very conscious Johnny is holding his hand, puts his feet flat against the wall of the pool and pulls with all his strength, yanking Johnny headlong into the water.


	17. Chapter 17

Johnny twists in the water, jeans and shirt dragging. He grabs for the lane rope and surfaces, whipping his hair out of his eyes and spitting, almost before he gets a lungful of air, “Goddammit!”

His eyes and sinuses are stinging, and he swears he can already feel the pool water drying his skin, tightening it over the bones of his face.

Daniel treads a few wary feet away: a controlled, almost pleasant smile on his face. Johnny reaches through the water with his arm, and the other man makes room at the wall for him. He coughs a little and spits to the side, at which Daniel wrinkles his nose.

“That wasn't a no,” points out Johnny, when he has the breath to gasp.

And Daniel says, steady, “No. It wasn't.”

They float, looking at each other. Johnny drifts forward and Daniel back: he puts his elbows up on the ledge, eyes alert as Johnny comes to grip either side, boxing him in. Daniel doesn't seem to be breathing as Johnny pulls himself in close.

He pauses inches away, his defensive instinct kicking in almost too late, as it usually does when it comes to this man. Johnny wasn't trained in it, after all.

“You're not about to, like. Knee me in the balls, are you?” he murmurs over his lips. He watches as Daniel's eyelids flutter from where they've mostly shut, lashes thick, long, and ever concealing.

“I, I don't—”

“Oh fuck, I'll risk it,” says Johnny and kisses him.

He's never been the first to make a move, not with Daniel. It was years before he even got to a place where he could regret it, to wonder about what he'd let slip away. Johnny will never be able to go back and kiss the boy who saved him.

Just then, he doesn't care.

Daniel's hands are around his waist, no longer holding onto the wall but clinging to Johnny. He is shaking slightly, and the water keeps trying to take him away, drag him down. Johnny surges forward to pin him safely against the wall and turns his head, licking into his mouth.

The loud splashing in the first lane eventually makes its way to his brain, and he pulls back. He glances over to where an older woman is doing a huffy back stroke away from them. He hopes she doesn't realize he actually works here.

He looks back to Daniel to say – he doesn't know yet, he doesn't really plan these things out. Except in the space of seconds where he's left the other man unattended, something has gone terribly wrong; Daniel's expression has seized up and he is staring at Johnny in horror.

Johnny leans back a little, brow pinched. A second later, he is really relieved to notice the familiar itchy, burning feeling spreading over his face and body. He looks down to his arms bracketing the other man, at the splotches of angry red. Right.

“Oh. Don't worry about this,” he says, with a general wave, “it's just something that happens sometimes,” every time, “when I'm in a chlorine pool.”

Disbelief creeps in around the horror. “You're _allergic?_ ”

“Not allergic—”

“Why did you even come in here?”

“I didn't expect to be pulled into the water when I came in, did I. That's on you.” He looks again at his forearm, where a large hive is forming. It kind of looks like Oklahoma. “Should probably get out now, though.”

“Jesus, you think?” says Daniel, shoving at him a little frantically. Uncalled for, Johnny thinks, but he lets himself be pushed along.

“ _Finally_ ,” snips the old lady in the first lane as they pass, “I was about to complain to management.”

Johnny doesn't even get a good look at the other man when he hauls himself out of the pool, because Daniel's hands are on his back, firmly steering him along across the tile floor, like Johnny doesn't know where the damn showers are in his own workplace.

“Strip,” orders Daniel.

“You gonna watch?” he says with a half-hearted leer. He doesn't look around because he thinks he feels a hive on his cheek, warping his mouth. Not hot.

“I'm going to go see if the front desk has some Benadryl or something. _You_ are going to shower off the pool water.”

So Johnny does that, vigorously scrubbing every inch of his body he can reach under the lukewarm spray of the shower. His clothes are a lost cause, so he steps over the sodden puddle and picks up the towel waiting for him on the bench. It must be Daniel's, he figures, and tries not to read into that too much as he dries off and knots it around his hips.

He sits on the bench and studies his arms and legs with a some of the same interest he had when he was eight, when the idea of his body doing something so comprehensively weird and unexpected was a source of fascination rather than dismay. The hives and rash haven't gotten worse, but they're still lingering. How long had he been in the pool? He hopes this isn't going to be a daylong thing; people in karate classes tend to be leery of taking instruction from someone covered in a skin rash.

Shit. He looks around for a clock. He is twenty minutes late for work.

“Okay,” says Daniel, rounding a bank of lockers, still in his swimsuit and a pair of flip-flops. “I have Benadryl and some aloe here. I don't know how old either are, but it's what they had.”

Johnny studies him critically. “Even your swim trunks are too long.”

Daniel glances up, quizzical as he works open the cap of the Benadryl. “What are you talking about?”

Johnny indicates him with a sweep of his hand. “What's with you covering up so much? Are you in some kind of denial about your body? You're not self-conscious or something, are you?” He is struck by a thought. “Oh, shit, is _that_ why you joined the Y?”

Daniel looks at him, wordless.

“Because you don't need to worry, man. You're your own thing, you're plenty hot. Like, I want to take those legs of yours and—

“If you ever,” says Daniel, “want to have even a _prayer_ of having sex with me, you will stop talking now.”

Johnny stops talking.

Daniel shakes his head and spills some pink tablets into his palm. Pink to match his face. He hands them to Johnny, along with his water bottle. Then he hefts the aloe bottle uncertainly; Johnny tries to communicate with his eyes and eyebrows that Daniel is more than welcome to rub him down with the stuff.

Daniel tosses the bottle in his lap.

He starts applying the aloe, but without much enthusiasm. “I think this is for sunburns, man. Not sure if it does any good for chlorine rashes.”

“Well, it probably can't hurt,” says Daniel, bracing his hands on his hips. He's looking increasingly unsettled.

First the hives, now sticky green goop. He is starting to wonder if maybe LaRusso somehow _did_ plan all of this, as some kind of sick self-defense technique against Johnny's incredible attractiveness. From what he remembers of high school biology, the animal kingdom has come up with weirder.

“I should really get going,” he says, rubbing the hateful stuff down his calf. “I'm like half an hour late for work now.”

The other man sighs, but he almost sounds relieved to have something to bitch about. “Between the allergy—”

“Not an allergy, man, I told you—”

“And your shift,” continues Daniel, determinedly pitching his voice over Johnny's, “I don't understand why you came into the pool in the first place.”

He lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Saw your car in the parking lot. Wanted to catch you,” he says. _Since I still don't have your number_ , he doesn't add sulkily, because whining isn't hot.

But maybe dejection is hot? Because next thing he knows, Daniel is bending over him on the bench, kissing him again. Johnny hums in surprise and drops the aloe to curl a hand around the back of his bare thigh, up underneath the hem of the trunks.

It doesn't last long, and Daniel turns around quickly the moment he breaks it off, but Johnny doesn't care. Johnny is flying high. This is what victory feels like: the itching-cool of tacky aloe gunk and the taste of chlorine on his tongue. Who knew?

Daniel grabs soap and shampoo from his sports bag, clearly heading to take a shower. Before Johnny can offer to join him, he says, “Go to work. I'll see you at the park tomorrow.”

Not a date, but still: a date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fwiw, johnny's actually correct for once: there is no such thing as a chlorine "allergy"


	18. Chapter 18

Shannon's just put Robby to bed and is sitting down in the living area with a glass of wine when her cell rings.

It's over on the counter, twenty feet at least. She stares over the back of the sofa at it. Perhaps this crisis might make her latent mutant powers suddenly manifest, and she'll be able to levitate the phone across the room. It rings again. She narrows her eyes.

It rings again.

“Fuck.”

She gets up and snatches it from the counter. She frowns at the small square display, not recognizing the number. She flips the phone open and says hello in her best, sweetest _fuck-you-it's-past-nine_ voice.

“Hey – Shannon? It's Daniel.”

Oh, this should be good. Entertaining, at least. She crosses back to the sofa and rolls over the back, landing on the cushions with a bounce. She reaches for her wine glass and says, “Hey, what's up, Jump Street?”

A slight pause over the line, and then Daniel says, “So that's going to be an ongoing thing, huh.”

“You know it.”

He gets over his grief quick. “Okay, well – sorry for calling so late, first of all. I just wanted to ask – this is, it's ridiculous, I know. But it just occurred to me, just now,” and wow this guy should _really_ consider drinking more. He was much more fun last night, or when he was helping piss their mutual ex off. Not to mention, like, articulate? Maybe she mistook spite for smarts, it wouldn't be the first time. Hell, she first met Johnny at a darts tournament, listening to him trash talk his opponent. Crazy, what alcohol and a good fray can do for a man's sex appeal. She sips her wine and remembers Daniel's still talking: “...I only ask because I actually bumped into him today, and you know him. Likes messing with people, especially if he thinks he knows something, even if what he _thinks_ he knows is actually wrong, or at least overblown,” and Jesus, the guy really sounds like he's going to go on like this for a while, she's gotta do something, she's gotta _stop this_.

“Hey,” she says sharply. “Officer Hanson?”

Silence on the other line.

“Okay, look. You called to ask if I called up Johnny this morning and narced on your five-martini confession from last night? That's what this is, right?”

“...Yes.” Very, very quiet.

She raises her chin and crosses her ankles primly. “Well, I am not a narc.”

“I wasn't trying to accuse you—”

“And,” she says loudly, “you need to chill out. Like, ohmygod. It's _Johnny_ , for fuck's sake. Messing with you? He wouldn't know where to begin!” Hell yeah, she is kicking _ass_ at this. Why did all her high school girlfriends stop talking to her? They should see her now. She's got a gay friend and is dispensing more advice than the unlicensed pharmacist down the street. “Look, I know he can be a bit of bully, but seriously, just slap him upside the head when he starts getting aggressive. It like, resets his brain.”

Daniel doesn't say anything for a long moment. She actually takes the phone away from her ear to frown at the display, make sure the call is still ticking along. It is.

“Jump Street?” she says. “You still there?”

“Yeah. And I think after this conversation, I might need a drink.”

“Yes, _finally_ – look, I'll wait while you pour yourself a glass, and we'll virtually toast each other from across the city, okay?”

Hard to say if he sounds defeated or just tired when he agrees. She's starting to think her new gay friend is a bit of an Eeyore, which, okay. Not ideal. But she's getting older now – maybe it's time to go less for the glitter-and-techno type gay and more weekends-in-Napa type gay?

Of course, if all this works out, Johnny will be there too. But she's willing to overlook small blemishes.


	19. Chapter 19

Shannon hands Robby off to him in the park lot the next day with a, “go easy on him, Johnny, I think he's got issues.” A kiss to her fingers and a wave to send the kiss to Robby and she's gone.

Johnny looks down at his son in confusion. “What issues you got? You're six years old.” He hopes the kid isn't still wetting the bed or something; that'd be so embarrassing. But surely Shannon would've bitched about it at some point if that was happening.

“I don't know,” says Robby, and immediately sets to looking worried about it. “What's issues?”

Johnny had decided to show up early, just in case, and his hunch pays off dividends when he spies Daniel and his daughter over by the playground. It looks like the man is trying to coax the girl to try the fireman pole, but the girl's not having it.

“You know what, I'm sure it's fine,” he says to Robby, ushering him in the right direction with a hand on his back. “If you find you have issues, what you do is bury them. Just ignore them, okay? They won't go away, but you can keeping going a lot longer than you'd expect. And fifty miles is better than ten any day, right?”

 _Robby is a very good listener_ , the kindergarten teacher had said last year, the one time Johnny managed to show up to a parent-teacher conference. He looks like he's listening to Johnny now, which is gratifying, even if the kid clearly doesn't understand what he's saying.

Daniel has given up on persuading his kid to jump by the time Johnny steps up to the playground tower. He's saying, a little plaintive, “Well, at least come down the slide, Sam.”

“I'm king of the castle,” replies the girl from up top, completely disinterested in her royal subject's frustration.

“Think she's got you beat, man,” says Johnny, stepping up on the other side of the structure. He meets Daniel's wide eyes over the play bridge. “Unless you want to lay siege, I mean. I think I see some weak spots in the castle defenses.”

“Oh?” says Daniel, after a moment. “And what are you supposed to be, a roving knight for hire?”

“You looking to overthrow this queen, I'm just saying, I might have some helpful pointers.”

Sam throws herself against the opposite side of the tower and shouts down at him, “King! I'm _King_!”

“You know what we do to kings in America?” Johnny tells her, not entirely faking his annoyance. She's totally cramping his whole dad flirtation scheme. “Keep it up, and we'll do to you what we did to King George.”

Sam gets up on her tip-toes to lean over the wall, eyes bright with interest. “What did you do to King George?” she asks in a hushed tone.

“You'll pay to find out. Let's just say it involved some tar and feathers.”

Daniel's eyes drift between his little despot and Johnny. He leans his shoulder against the fire pole, like he's settling in and asks, “And what do you charge for your castle-storming expertise?” He's totally on board for the dad flirtation scheme, hell yes.

Johnny swings his arms a little, like he's thinking. “Tonight?” he suggests.

“Can't tonight,” says Daniel, but before Johnny can react: “I work late on soccer practice days.”

“Late's fine,” he says. “It can be a late consultation, late... sliding into early.” He risks bouncing his eyebrows a little, in case Daniel doesn't get it.

Daniel gets it, but he looks like he wishes he didn't. He shifts against the pole and folds his arms, looking down. “That's not how this works. We don't actually know each other, you get that, right? We shouldn't just jump into—” his eyes dart to his daughter, “a siege together.”

“But, I mean. We already kinda did. Santa Barbara?” he reminds him, when Daniel looks confused.

“That doesn't count,” he says flatly.

“I was too drunk to appreciate it, true.”

“More like too repressed.”

“Yeah, that too,” he agrees easily. “Well, hey. Look at us now – shoe's on the other foot.”

Daniel stiffens. Shit. “No, it's really not.”

Johnny's instinct is to argue the point, keep pushing, but he makes himself back off; he doesn't like the tense line of those shoulders. With LaRusso, there's arguing and then there's _arguing_.

He asks instead, “How about Saturday, then? In the evening, after the games and post-victory celebrations have ended and all the kids are in bed.”

Daniel's eyebrows arch with delicate skepticism. “Post-victory celebrations? Yeah, sure, if your team can manage to win a game.”

Johnny freezes, hands braced over the play bridge. His mouth drops open a little, half-outraged and half-delighted, thinking: _there he is. There's the little prick I remember._

He wants nothing more than to tackle the other man onto the bouncy composite rubber mulch of the play area's floor, but this impulse is thankfully derailed by Robby, who infiltrated the castle when no one was looking and now screams for freedom, launching himself at Sam.

Johnny and Daniel stop staring at each other when the two kids tumble roughly down the slide, pulling each other's hair and shouting.


	20. Chapter 20

On Saturday morning, they step up to one another, squaring off over the fold-out table with the shitty coffee and lemonade the summer rec people put out before every game.

Daniel's brought his own coffee in a fancy thermos, so there can be no reason for him to be standing there unless it's to talk to him. Johnny tries to hide how pleased he is by this, and then remembers that hiding's for pussies, so he turns a smirk on the other man instead.

Daniel's eyebrows twitch up. “If this is how smug you are before even one date, I shudder to think what you'll be like after.”

Johnny gives his baby cup of coffee one last stir and then tosses the stick over his shoulder. He turns to Daniel and says, “If you're asking about aftercare – don't worry, I'm great at it.”

“Jesus,” says Daniel, turning away. At first Johnny thinks he retreating, but the man only walks a couple feet away before stopping.

Ah. Waiting for him. Johnny walks over. “Okay, no sex talk over the concessions table,” he says, and Daniel nods emphatically at the field. “Got it. Good idea.”

“I was wondering,” says Daniel, sipping from his thermos, “if you wanted to put a wager on the games today.”

“Betting on youth soccer. Who'd pass that up?” He darts a covert look over the other man's placid expression. “What're you thinking?”

Daniel lifts a shoulder. “My team wins our game, you buy dinner. If we lose, I'll buy.”

Johnny can afford dinner for two. “Okay. And if my team wins our game?”

“I'll let you blow me.”

How could he forget: when LaRusso decides he's game, he doesn't fuck around. He just fucks with Johnny.

He clears his throat and shakes the coffee he spilled over his hand with a flick of his fingers. Daniel continues to smile pleasantly at passing families, one hand in the pocket of his stupid slacks – man dresses for these games like a college basketball coach, it's ridiculous – all while giving the distinct impression he's watching Johnny like a hawk from the corner of his eyes.

“And – if my team loses?” he asks, in a mostly normal voice. He doesn't know what he'll do if Daniel offers a blowjob in turn (this is a lie; he'll root against his bumbling pack of sweet-faced six-year-olds like they're the fucking Yankees).

Daniel turns to him, eyes dark. He presses a hand to Johnny's shoulder and says, “Then I guess we'll both be going home disappointed.”

 _Fucking asshole_ , Johnny thinks, almost awed as he watches him walk away.  
  


* * *

  
“Okay team, huddle up,” he calls and waits for the kids to stop fiddling with their jerseys and socks and gather around. He puts his hands on his thighs and bends down so he can talk to them to their faces, like equals. “We're going to win today. I believe this with all my heart. I can feel it in my bones. And I need you all to believe it too, okay?”

“Yes, Coach,” chorus the kids.

“Now those little bastards you're up against? They're from Chatsworth. Do you know what that means?” Some of them shake their heads. Others squint. Coach Martin looks like he badly wants to interrupt. “It means they're a bunch of rednecks. Now, you don't want to get beat by a bunch of rednecks, do you?”

The brighter ones who can take a hint from context say no; the bowlcut asks what a redneck is. Johnny ignores the question and straightens up.

“You win,” he says, “and it's pizza and ice cream for everyone.”

The kids scatter to their positions, looking jazzed. Johnny is a genius at motivation.  
  


* * *

  
Johnny is going to get cheated out of Daniel LaRusso's cock and it's going to be all Coach Martin and his inadequate sperm's fault. The man's son keeps getting the ball and running away from it the moment any of the opposite team's defenders approach. It's cost them possession four times already.

“What's your son's name again?” he demands, pacing along the sideline in agitation.

Coach Martin looks nervously at the field. “I don't think—”

Johnny snaps his fingers. “His name, c'mon, now.”

“Demetri.”

Johnny turns back to field and bellows, “DEMETRI! STOP! RUNNING! AWAY!” He turns back to his assistant coach and says in a more normal tone, “Wow, you gave your son up just like that. Don't ever put yourself in a position to be interrogated.”

Coach Martin's shoulders slump, but they score a couple minutes later, so Johnny doesn't know what his problem is.  
  


* * *

  
When the team wins 2-1, Johnny throws his hat in the air and grabs Coach Martin in a bear hug and then runs down the line of his team, giving each kid a high five and promising them a bottomless buffet of pizza and ice cream.

“I don't know what you're talking about, honey,” says Rick Martin's wife Krissy, standing at his side. “I think Coach Lawrence seems great with the kids. I've never seen a grown man so excited for a summer rec league.”


	21. Chapter 21

“Can you go get the pizza and ice cream?” Johnny asks Coach Martin. He reaches into his pocket for his wallet and pulls out all his cash. “I need to go rub this victory in the face of my bully, you understand.”

Coach Martin accepts the folded stack of bills. “Uh, this looks like a lot—”

“They're mostly ones.” Johnny claps him on the arm and turns away, tipping his head to look for LaRusso. He makes it maybe thirty yards when he realizes what he's done, the catastrophe he's just brought down upon his head. “Shit. Shit—” He spins around and searches for Coach Martin, but the man's already left. “ _Shit_.”

In all his excitement, he forgot the first wager for Daniel's game. They won, which means Johnny's responsible for dinner, and he's just handed over the last of his money for fucking pizza and ice cream.  
  


* * *

  
“Shannon,” he says, casual. “Hey. So what you think of our striker, here?”

He looks down to Robby and gives him a wink. Robby scored one of the goals.

“Amazing,” she says, pecking one-handed at her phone's buttons. Her hand reaches up to card through Robby's hair absently. “He's the next – guy, that guy. Beckham.”

“Absolutely,” agrees Johnny, keenly aware of the time passing. “Hey, I was wondering, could I borrow like – fifty bucks?”

Her eyes are the first to raise, followed by her eyebrows. She doesn't reply; her expression says it all.

“I'll pay you back, obviously,” he says. “It's only – I just bought all the pizza for the kids, but I've actually got this date tonight, and – and it's with Daniel, you like Daniel, remember?”

“Daniel shops at Banana Republic, and not even the outlet,” says Shannon sweetly. “I think he can afford to buy you dinner, Johnny.”

“That wasn't the agreement,” he tries explaining, but she's already walking away. Robby angles a look back at him between the space of her elbow, and Johnny gives him a reassuring smile and wave.

Fuck.  
  


* * *

  
He finds him in the parking lot.

Daniel turns around from shutting his trunk and pauses, leaning back against it to consider Johnny, who wonders if he's thinking what Johnny's thinking, which is mostly an image of his face buried in the other man's lap. They just need to get through this damn dinner first.

“So,” says Daniel. “Congratulations, Coach Lawrence.”

“Yeah, you too.”

“Where you taking me, have you decided yet?” He seems to be enjoying this, which is probably a good sign, even if it feels bizarrely like hazing.

“It's a surprise,” says Johnny, because he has no fucking idea.

Daniel nods, accepting this. “Okay, but are we meeting somewhere or should I pick you up?”

“I'm not a chick,” he says, “you don't need to pick me up.”

“It's the 2000s, Johnny,” says Daniel, amused. “A guy can get picked up for a date. Especially if he's dating... another guy.”

“Fine, then I'll pick you up.” If he's got him in the car, Daniel probably can't run away.

Except he shakes his head, expression still fixed on pleasant. “I prefer to drive.”

“Of course you do.”

They stare at each other.

Johnny says, “How about we—”

“Let's just meet up, yeah,” finishes Daniel. He looks meaningfully at him. “Seven okay? Where we going?”

Johnny thinks fast. He can't take Daniel LaRusso to a McDonald's or In-N-Out – can he? – no, Jesus, he can't – but he's only got like ten bucks left at home. And then it hits him, like god reaching down and pulling the light bulb string above his head: he has a favor he can call in.  
  


* * *

  
“Well, this,” says Daniel, and no more. He looks great in a pair of dark jeans and a navy button down, both fitting properly for once. His expression could be better, but the night's young. He looks up at the saxophone and vinyls on the wall, all the usual kitschy shit, and apparently decides to stick to saying nothing.

Johnny endures.

The host approaches them: light brown hair with a slight wave to it, body built solid like a short but bad-tempered Mack truck.

“Welcome to Applebee's,” says Dutch and then he recognizes Johnny and says, “Oh, fuck no.”

Johnny leans over the host podium. “Oh, fuck yes. You owe me, man.”

“Yeah, I know you _said_ that, but I thought you meant it in a figurative way. Didn't think you'd actually drag your faggy ass over here.”

“It was a very literal favor. I know you have brain damage, but you gotta remember what that means, right? You. Owe. Me.”

Dutch looks past him with a smirk. “Well, your fudge-packing little date just left, so – still want that table, or—”

Johnny looks around quickly. “Shit.” He shoves past a waiting family of traumatized four and sprints out the door.

“Daniel, wait,” he calls, running after the man quickly heading for his car. “Hey—” He reaches for his shoulder, and it's only instinct that makes him duck just in time to avoid the roundhouse kick. “Whoa," he says, hands up. “Okay, _hot_ , but – hey—”

“I cannot believe I fucking fell for this shit.” Daniel is pale with fury, eyes snapping.

“You didn't, I'm not – Jesus, I'm not fucking with you, I swear.”

“You ask to meet you at an Applebee's, of all places, and then the host just happens to be a guy who beat me up back in school?”

“He doesn't remember you,” says Johnny.

Daniel's face twists. “Oh, nice.”

“No, really – I mean, he's got actual, literal brain damage. Dutch did some time a few years back and – some shit happened inside. Bashed his head up real good. His memory is like swiss cheese, I'm telling you.”

It's too weird for him to make up, surely, or at least he hopes someone with Daniel's level of suspicion can believe that.

Slowly, the other man relaxes out of his fighting stance. Johnny cautiously lowers his arms. A couple edges past them towards their car where it's parked beside Daniel's Acura.

Daniel still looks angry. “Why are we here, Johnny. You're either fucking with me or have the worst judgment I've ever seen. And bad taste too, though I kind of already knew that.”

Johnny nods, placating. “I might have – two of those, okay,” he hedges. Shit. He doesn't see a way out of this. He sighs and scrapes a hand over his head and says in a rush, “I sort of blew most of my cash on pizza and ice cream. For the kids, I mean. I wasn't really thinking ahead.” He tosses his hands at his sides, like: there. Now you see me.

Daniel doesn't say anything for a long moment. He blinks at Johnny and then almost seems to want to laugh a little. He turns bodily around in a circle; it's kind of weird. Johnny waits.

“Oh, this is going great so far,” he says eventually, and Johnny perks up a little because _so far_ implies it's not yet over.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and says, “Do you uh. Wanna go back inside?”

“Not in the slightest.” Daniel cuts his eyes over and says, almost conciliatory, “Look, Applebee's hasn't been any good since the nineties.”

“Their fries have gone downhill,” he allows.

He looks around the commercial strip. “This is Winnetka, there's gotta be an – In-N-Out or something around here, right? You got enough cash to cover that, Romeo?”

Johnny bites back a relieved grin. “Yeah. Yeah, I can manage that.”  
  


* * *

  
In what is now going to be Johnny's favorite In-N-Out on the planet, Daniel stretches his legs out across his booth and talks shit about the other teams that day in between bites of his burger. It's the most relaxed he's seen him since they were teenagers.

“The coach of the Woodland Hills kids had a goddamn clipboard,” he says. “I think he was actually trying to call plays.”

“Wannabe football coaches,” says Johnny, dismissive. “You see them from time to time in soccer, it's a disgrace. If they just let the kids play touch football at this age, we wouldn't have to deal with it. And,” he adds thoughtfully, “it'd weed out the meatheads from the ranks.”

“They're six and seven, Johnny, we shouldn't be calling any kid a meathead.”

He swipes a fry through his ketchup and gives him a look. “You telling me there are no kids on your team you'd like to drop?”

Daniel chews on that for a moment, but his mouth starts to curl like he can't help it. He drops his feet to the floor and leans over the table, lowers his voice. Johnny leans forward too.

“My team's from Encino,” says Daniel, low. “I'd like to drop like, half of them.” And when Johnny huffs a laugh: “You should hear the whining some of them do when they're asked to help pick up cones. It's incredible. Is that what growing up with servants does to a kid?”

Johnny shrugs. “Wouldn't know, we moved in with my stepdad when I was twelve. Before that it was all one bedrooms with janky plumbing.”

“Right, that's right,” says Daniel. He hesitates, eyes flicking over Johnny, and says, “I was uh – really sorry to hear about Laura, by the way. Would've come to the funeral, but we were in Jersey.”

Johnny sobers. He shrugs and reaches for another fry, eyes down. “Your mom passed along all the regrets, don't worry about it.” He doesn't look up for a bit, pretending he's really into his cooling fries. He doesn't like talking about it, even now: six years later.

Daniel thankfully picks up on this and sits back again. He reaches for his soda and says lightly, “So who were you playing today, Chatsworth?” Johnny glances up and nods. “You know they're all rednecks and porn producers up there, right?”  
  


* * *

  
Afterwards, in the parking lot, the summer sun is finally setting and the lights are blinking on, buzzing and attracting their share of bugs. Johnny and Daniel walk to their cars, keys in hand, and then stand there, looking at each other.

Johnny clears his throat and leans on his car, trying to play it casual. “So, this was—”

“Just the beginning,” says Daniel. And when Johnny stares, he mirrors his posture. He looks completely cool, except for the way his fingers tap the top of the Acura in nervous beat. “Your team won, didn't they?”

His mouth goes dry, which is no good, considering what's in store for him here. He says, “I wasn't going to insist.”

Daniel shakes his head, almost marveling. “God love you, Johnny, you remember what the wager was, right?”

“Oh, believe me,” he says, “I remember.”

“And you're that hot for it.” He says it like he still doesn't quite believe it.

“I'd blow you up against that snooty Japanese engine if I thought you'd let me.”

Daniel turns away, shaking his head and muttering to himself. He lifts a hand to wipe his mouth. Johnny waits. In his hand, he's clutching his key so tight, he thinks the edges might break the skin any second.

When Daniel finally looks back at him, his face looks a little warm, but he's determined. “Your place okay? I've got a roommate at the moment.”

He's going to have Daniel LaRusso in his bed. Thank fuck he changed the sheets yesterday.

“Yeah,” he says, totally cool. “My place is fine.”


	22. offside

It'll be years before he can appreciate any potential metaphor in the situation, but he finds Johnny Lawrence out by the dumpsters.

It's prom night, senior year, and Daniel's just been dumped in front of half their graduating class.  
  


* * *

  
Daniel bursts through the double doors of the gymnasium, taking immediate relief in the night air on his skin. Between his temper and the polyester suit, he really started to overheat inside. Few more minutes of that scene and he might've blown for good, transformed himself through sheer willpower into some kind of Carrie figure without the pig's blood and mass murder and okay, maybe not like Carrie at all, except it's prom and he's fucking fed up with everybody.

He's eighteen now, he could move back to Jersey. Just that second, it even sounds really tempting. If it wasn't for Mr. Miyagi, he would've written California off ages ago. No one else is worth the trouble, that's for sure.

The distinct sound of an aluminum can hitting metal catches his attention, and he looks up from the ground, spying the play of someone's waving shadow thrown up on the bricks of the school wall further down the lawn.

He walks and angles his head curiously to look, and almost backtracks when he sees the shadow belongs to Johnny Lawrence.

Except something makes Daniel hang in there; maybe it's that Johnny's alone, or that he has a line of beers set up carefully along the top edge of one of the dumpsters. As he watches, Johnny finishes one, sets it down next to its brothers, and then finger-flicks it into the cavernous abyss of the empty dumpster. He has four more to go, and Daniel's never been the greatest at math but it seems like a lot for this early in the night.

Walk away, says a voice he'll later wish like hell he'd listened to.

“Johnny?” he says instead, stepping forward into the floodlight of the nearby parking lot post.

Johnny spins around, finger poised over the tab of his next beer. He's pink in the face but mostly still there in the eyes; Daniel knows this because they go wide and a little panicked for a second. Johnny always looks like that when he sees him these days. Like Daniel is this awful thing he has to fortify himself against.

“Daniel,” he says after a second, abruptly loosening and playing cool. He's so bad at it, Daniel's almost embarrassed for him. “What's up?”

“Prom,” he replies dryly, “So what are you doing out here by yourself?”

Johnny cracks open the beer one-handed and shrugs. “You know how I feel about dances, man. What about you?”

“Just needed some air.”

They stare at each other. Johnny takes a swift drink of his beer, unblinking.

Daniel wanders closer, mostly because part of him still gets a petty little kick out of what the proximity does to the other guy. He tilts his head and studies him. Now that he's not in the shadows, he can see the other boy more clearly and—

“What are you _wearing_? How old is that suit?”

Johnny shoots the cuffs of his black tux. “I was going for like a, a Roger Moore thing. Y'know – 007?” He turns his back on Daniel and then jumps and twists, bringing his hand up like a gun. “Bang.”

Daniel lets the finger gun poke his chest. “Oh, damn,” he says. “You got me.” He swats the hand down a moment later and folds his arms. “You get this is prom and not a costume party, right?”

Johnny straightens up. “You telling me you don't feel like you're wearing a costume in that? At least I look like a badass.”

His face heats. He knew he shouldn't've listened to his ma about the powder blue ruffles. Feels like some kind of Disco Jonathan Harker in this shit.

He says, “The suit's only half the battle, you know. Keep jumping around like that, no one's gonna think you're cool ever again.”

Johnny doesn't look like he believes him. What else is new. Like, who is Daniel to doubt the invincible coolness of Johnny “I Buy My Mom Chocolates Every Valentines Day” Lawrence. God, he can't stand this guy. No wonder they've barely spoken all semester.

Daniel glances over his shoulder at the doors of the building as they swing open again, leaking music and light and a couple too busy groping at each other to notice anyone hanging around down the way.

He puts his hands in his pockets and doesn't, for some inexplicable reason, leave. “So why you out here, anyway? Where's your date – Liz Something, right?”

(Elizabeth Sackett, she sat in front of Daniel in Physics all year and liked to wear tangerine-scented hairspray and scoop necks that fluttered softly against her deep cleavage. It feels weird just now to admit he knows her name, like it'd mean something, or maybe Johnny in his typical dense way would _think_ it means something that Daniel noticed who he's dating at all.)

“Liz,” says Johnny, nodding. He reaches for the beer sitting on the edge of the dumpster and toasts the air with it. “Lizzy. Oh, Lizzy. She's – ” he breaks off with a snort of laughter, “you'll never guess who she's making out with right now in the corner of the gym.”

Daniel tips his chin, a smirk waiting in the wings. “Who?”

“Fucking _Parker!_ ” When Daniel laughs, it renews the grin on Johnny's pink face. “Right? I'd kick his ass, except I'm kind of impressed. Didn't know he had it in him. I mean – Lizzy Sackett.” He whistles with his beer-wet lips and takes another drink.

“You don't seem too broken up about it,” observes Daniel. “Woulda thought you'd be angrier.”

Johnny shrugs, looks down at the can in his hand. “School's basically over. None of this matters now.”

“Yeah.” He looks away, chewing his lip and blinking over at the full parking lot. It'd be emptying out soon, and remain mostly empty for the next several months, until some other group of students filled it. “Yeah, I hear that.”

When he looks back at Johnny, the other boy is watching him absently. Eyes soft, line of his mouth relaxed, maybe wistful. A hot, nervous twinge runs down Daniel's back at the sight, same as always. And it's a lie, same as always.

“I uh,” he says, grasping for something, anything. “Me and Ali, we kind of got into a fight.”

“Yeah, duh,” says Johnny, and Daniel's balance resets itself gratefully; he scowls at him. “Like half the gym heard. UCLA football player, huh?”

He blows out a hard, short breath. “Yeah, apparently.”

Johnny bends his head back and tries to balance his beer on the flat of his forehead. “Fuck football players,” he says, a little distracted by his own great athletic feat. “Football's a stupid sport. And Ali's just rebelling, that's all. Now that high school's done, she thinks she can date a football player because it's no longer cliché.”

Daniel shifts on his feet, tapping the leather soles of his dress shoes on the slick pavement. “You think?”

Johnny tries nodding, and his beer topples off his head. “ _Fuck_.” He looks over. “What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know her. Don't take it personally, man.”

“Gotta say, wasn't expecting to get a consolation talk from her last ex-boyfriend,” he says, but it comes out a little stilted, because they both know that's not all Johnny is; the knowledge squeezes all lightness from the words. Daniel almost winces.

Johnny considers him for a moment, hands brushing aside the sides of his tux to sit at his waistband. Daniel can't tell how drunk he is, or what he's thinking, and it unsettles him.

“Look, this whole thing's lame,” says Johnny, nodding at the gym doors. “You wanna get out of here?”

And yeah, Daniel guesses he does.  
  


* * *

  
So, what happened was: five months ago, Daniel kissed another guy.

Neither of them handled it very well. A life-changing karate battle and one fucked-up knee later, they made peace and went their separate ways.

Mostly.

They made nice in front of their mothers and avoided each other at school. In the spring, Johnny went out for baseball, and Daniel stuck to training with Mr. Miyagi.

The end. The end. The end.  
  


* * *

  
“We'll take your car,” says Johnny. He's hugging his three remaining beers to his chest as he pats his suit pockets, and misses the look Daniel throws him.

“Oh, we will, will we,” he says, when his glare has grown too stale to be of use.

“I mean, I _could_ drive,” says Johnny.

“That's not what I meant.”

“But Bobby stole my keys, and I can't find my spare. Thought I had it,” he mutters more quietly, contorting his body to reach into his back pockets with the wrong hand. “Anyway, yeah, we'll take your car. Still driving the banana?”

He doesn't deign this with a response. When they get to the Super De Luxe, Johnny lets out a loud hoot, which Daniel also ignores in favor of stripping off his stupid suit jacket and launching it in the backseat with prejudice.

Johnny tips himself ass-backwards over the passenger door and lays there on the bench seat, blond hair a halo against the leather as he looks up at Daniel. He's still clutching the beers to his chest.

Daniel sucks on his cheek and braces his hands along the car door, studying him. “How many of those have you had?”

Johnny smiles up at him. His dress shoes kick idly in the air where they hang over the side of the car.

“Like – those weren't part of a six-pack, were they,” says Daniel.

A breathy sigh. “You're so judgy.”

He puts a hand out. “Hand 'em over.”

“What? No.” Johnny retracts his feet and twists his body until he's more or less upright in the seat. He nods at Daniel. “Are you driving, or what? Thought we were getting out of here.”

“Yeah, we will,” says Daniel. “But maybe I want a beer first. Seems only fair, man.” He flexes his hand. When Johnny hesitates, he says, “C'mon, don't leave me hanging. It's always more fun drinking with someone, isn't it?”

This convinces the other boy. He grudgingly passes over a beer. Daniel hefts the can, looking down at the Brown Derby label for a moment before turning and pitching it as hard as he can across the lot. It arcs high and lands with a violent spray eight cars over.

“Hey!” Johnny's up on his knees, sagging over the seat, mouth gaping in ludicrous outrage. He turns this look upon Daniel as he slides behind the wheel of the car. “You little _prick_.”

“Open one of those last two inside the car, and I'm kicking your ass to the curb,” says Daniel. He turns the key, flips the lights.

And they're away.  
  


* * *

  
The thing is, Johnny's bigger, taller. And he's always acted like he knows it, too; uses his body and physicality in a way that screams _bully_.

Who could blame Daniel for wanting to poke back when it turned out the guy had some kind of crush on him? It was objectively hilarious: the way he'd turn red, jerk away, freeze up. Suddenly helpless in the throes of all those hormones and feelings – c'mon, that's funny as hell. Karmic justice, or something. And the knowledge that little ole _Daniel_ could provoke these reactions felt a bit like discovering he could move a mountain.

Less hilarious was realizing Johnny thought it was the end of the world. Not funny at all was how he started to look at Daniel like he was the worst thing to ever happen to him. And after the kiss? Like Daniel made him sick to his stomach.

If he'd just stopped _looking_ at Daniel, it wouldn't have been so bad, he thinks. But Johnny never fucking did.

Not until after the Tournament.  
  


* * *

  
Johnny is the most annoying person Daniel's ever driven around: worse than Ali, worse than his ma.

Once he gave up on drinking in the car, he drops the cans into the foot well and set to fiddling with the radio; he doesn't let it rest on any one frequency for longer than a couple seconds before turning the dial to the next. He seems unduly fascinated by the numbers, and when Daniel glances at his face, his eyes are narrow, intent.

“Could you just pick a station and leave it,” he says.

“If you had a tape deck, this wouldn't be an issue,” replies Johnny.

“This car's a classic, I'm not about to junk it up with post-factory additions.” He watches him for a couple more seconds and says, “And sit back, maybe? Put the damn seat belt on. You know this thing doesn't have airbags, right?”

“Because it's a classic,” says Johnny, half-mocking, but he slumps back in the seat and gropes for the belt. His long legs sprawl in front of him, knees hanging wide. He's so stupidly drunk.

Daniel passes a hand over his eyes, rubbing hard enough to make the traffic lights smear for a couple seconds.

“So what's the plan, where are we going?” he asks. Johnny rolls his head over to blink at him. His hand is busy tugging on his black bow tie. Daniel says, “Well? It's not even ten. I'm assuming you don't want me to drop you back at home—”

Johnny pulls a face. “Fuck no.” He bends forward to reach for a beer, but pauses and glances at Daniel, obviously remembering his warning. Daniel narrows his eyes, and Johnny falls back again in defeat. “I don't know – you hungry? Let's go to a drive-in or something, get some food.”

“Can I trust you not to make a mess all over my car?”

“LaRusso, calm down. I'm not that drunk, seriously.”

“Right.” Daniel hits his indicator, takes a left.

“Seriously, if I was drunk, I'd be making much more of an ass of myself in front of you. Ergo, not drunk.” He slaps the top of the door like he's won something.

Daniel considers this for a couple seconds, finger tapping the steering wheel.

“Did you just say _ergo_?” is what he decides to ask. His brain is not letting him think of the implication of the rest of it; it's taken Johnny's words and smuggled them into some dark backroom. Working them over. Trying to come up with a plan. Meanwhile, he's gotta deal with the guy in the present.

He finds them a late night drive-in place over on Victory and parks under the bright lights next to a little plastic menu box.

“What do you want,” he starts to say, peering at the menu, but then Johnny's all up in his business, one hand braced on the steering wheel, the other on the seat behind him. Jackass doesn't even mean anything by it, he's just too drunk to see the menu clearly.

Daniel's not above using his elbows, and the other boy jerks back, hand coming up to rub his firm chest like he's been grievously wounded.

“It's a diner,” says Daniel, before he can voice a complaint. “It's not that complicated. Cheeseburger and fries good for you?”

Johnny throws his long arm up over the back of the seat and says, kind of mutinous, “Chili cheeseburger.”

“You get there is no way I'm letting you eat a chili cheeseburger on these seats, right?”

He makes a harassed face, like Daniel's being unreasonable. “So let's get it to go and drive some place. Kinda bullshit having a chili cheeseburger without a beer, anyway.”

He can't argue with that plan; anything to save his leather. He puts in the order and they sit back, waiting under the lights and listening to the music blasting from the menu speakers.

After a couple minutes, a Crown Vic rolls up: police cruiser, lights off. Daniel remembers the beers at Johnny's feet and carefully doesn't look down. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Johnny shift in his seat, feet dragging back in the foot well, crowding the cans. Neither of them look at the cops.

But the thing about cops, of course, is that they have some kind of sixth sense for when people don't want to deal with them; an overrated sixth sense, maybe, since that's most of the time.

The driver of the cruiser looks over at them. Daniel feels out the spaces between his molars with his tongue and studies the strip mall across the street like it's fascinating.

“You boys doing alright over there,” calls the driver. Fishing.

Before Daniel can respond, Johnny waves a hand and says, too loud, “Yep, great!”

He wants to drag a hand down his face.

The cop gets out of the cruiser and moseys over, hands on his belt. Daniel curses internally and gives up, turning in his seat to meet his eyes. The cop looks half-amused, half-suspicious. He knows exactly what he's looking at: a pair of high school kids on prom night. Illegal alcohol isn't exactly a reach, even without Johnny's pink face and bright eyes currently directed guiltily down between his feet.

“So, what's this,” says the cop. “You boys come from some kind of party?”

“Prom,” says Daniel. “Yeah.”

“Left kind of early, didn't you.”

“Sometimes the night doesn't go how you'd expect.” His hand on the wheel lifts, like _what you gonna do?_

“Or maybe you're the supply run guys, huh. Going out to get the drinks, bring 'em back to the others.” The cop bends a little to get a look at Johnny's reddening face. “This one already looks like he's been dipping into something.”

“Oh, please, don't mind him, Officer,” says Daniel. “Someone gave him a couple drinks in the gym, yeah, but look – we both just got dumped by our dates. He took it kinda hard. I'm just trying to get some food in him before driving him home. His folks are real strict.”

The cop puts his head back and stares him down. Daniel doesn't blink, and after a calculated moment, he lets his mouth curl into a coaxing smile. “Aw, c'mon, you gotta remember how it was. We saved up and dropped a bundle on these monkey suits, then the night comes and the chicks ditch us? It's like, the disappointment of the century over here.”

The cop's fingers tap along his belt. Behind him, the cruiser radio chirps, and the other officer calls his name.

“He's not gonna drink anymore tonight?” says the cop, pointing at Johnny's bent head.

“Scout's honor,” says Daniel. From the left, he sees the waitress coming out with two large brown bags: their order. They are so close. He waits, keeping his easy smile in place, his body relaxed against the seat.

The cop steps back. “Have a good night, boys. Stay out of trouble.”

“Thank you, Officer,” he says.

The cruiser pulls away and the waitress arrives with the food. Daniel hands over the cash, tells her to keep the change. Meanwhile, Johnny is staring at him, mouth agape.

“How,” he demands, “did you do that?”

Daniel flashes him a smug smile. “It pays to know how to talk to people, man.”

He drives out of the lot, back onto the street, aiming for nowhere.  
  


* * *

  
Daniel's had the occasional flicker of attraction to other guys before, back home. Never did anything about it; never felt the need, not when there were plenty of girls to chase. But he never thought anything was wrong with it, with _him_. Not until Johnny and his stupid life-ruining crisis.

So, yeah. He got a little mad about it. He figures he's entitled; he didn't ask for the other guy to come into his life, staring at him one way and acting another. Eyes promising and fists denying.

Daniel doesn't like being denied.  
  


* * *

  
They end up driving over to Ahmanson Ranch, the undeveloped hills in the west Valley. There are plenty of winding dirt roads to drive around on and get lost in, and it's up away from the lights of the city, as much as one can be without leaving properly.

Mindful of Johnny's growing impatience, Daniel finds a mostly flat stretch of grass off the road beneath a full-canopied tree and parks the car.

“Hey. Take it easy,” he says as Johnny jumps out before the car's come to a full stop.

“I've had to piss for like fifty minutes, don't tell me to take it easy.”

He takes five steps and unzips his fly, groaning loudly as he throw his head back. Daniel thinks about how many beers he's had – Six? Seven? Eight? – and figures: yeah, fair.

He carries the food over past the tree and tosses them to the ground before sitting down cross-legged and digging in. The lights of the city are stretched out below them between big gaps in the trees, and it's almost kind of pretty.

“If I give you one of these, are you going to chuck it again?” asks Johnny, coming up behind him. He's got the two remaining beers in his hands. He's ditched his suit jacket, unbuttoned his collar. With his blond fringe tumbling over his eyes, he looks more relaxed than drunk, but Daniel wants to put that down to the dim lighting.

“You should probably give me both,” he says. “Given how many you've already had.”

“Nice try, punk,” he says, and tosses one in Daniel's lap. He cracks the remaining and tips his head back, throat flexing as he takes a long drink. He lowers it and says, “Told you like fifty times already, I'm not that drunk.”

Daniel looks down at his own can, so he doesn't have to look at him. Johnny's always too open like this, regardless of what he says. “Food's getting cold,” he mutters, and nudges the second bag at the other boy.

Johnny throws himself on the ground and reaches for the bag. The next several minutes are spent in contented silence, each making his way through his burger and fries.

“Damn it,” says Johnny, leaning forward over his crossed legs as the chili from his cheeseburger drips onto the grass.

“Told ya,” says Daniel.

When the food has been demolished into nothing but stained brown paper and droplets of ketchup and chili sauce, Johnny stretches out with a long sigh onto his back and stares up at the tree canopy above. Daniel gathers the garbage into a pile off to the side and follows suit.

His chest kinda hurts, and he knows it's not heartburn because he's only eighteen, but he's willing to pretend for the moment.

“Man,” he says, heavy, “this is not what I expected to be doing tonight.”

Johnny snorts a laugh and says, “Tell me about it.”

“This whole year's been one mess after another. Glad it's over.”

Johnny pauses, weirdly; Daniel keenly feels that it is weird.

“It wasn't all bad,” he says. “I mean, we went to the playoffs.”

“And lost in the first round, in a game I didn't even get to play in.”

“Okay, but like – the All Valley. That worked out.”

Daniel can't let _that_ stand uncontested. He sits up and looks down at the other boy and says, “Your sensei tried to choke you in the parking lot right after the match.”

Johnny swallows hard at the reminder, but he's got a stubborn look on his face and says, aggressive, “Yeah, so what?”

“So _what_?” he repeats in disbelief.

“Kreese turned out to be an asshole, big deal. But I didn't.” His eyes dart to Daniel's, like he's asking for confirmation. “I mean – right? It worked out in the end. We did. Right?”

He stares down at him. Johnny's laid himself out, exposed and waiting for a response. His blue eyes look almost black in the dark, and they're almost pleading with Daniel.

“Yeah,” he says, voice scraping low and kinda hurting his throat. “You and me. We did it.”

Johnny smiles up at him in immediate relief. “So – there you go. There's one good thing that happened this year.”

And Daniel can't help himself, he's not built to withstand this kind of torture.

He returns affection with affection, it's the way he is, and denying it always feels like he's making some unforgivable mistake. Like how he'll always feel he never told his dad he loved him enough before he died, or how he never said a proper goodbye to his uncle before they left Jersey. Sometimes you only get one last chance to show someone how you feel, but you never know when that'll be, do you? So why take the risk?

He bends down and covers Johnny's mouth with his own: light and as unthreatening as he can make it. The other boy doesn't move, doesn't kiss back, and after a second, Daniel withdraws, saying, “Sorry, I. I was just—”

Johnny pulls him back down.  
  


* * *

  
It should be nine months of anger and challenge pushed into one kiss, but it's nothing like that, nothing like Daniel could have imagined.

Johnny pulls him close, shaking beneath him, but his mouth is firm and hot and impossibly sweet. He breathes against Daniel like he wants to inhale him. His hands feel huge against the small of his back, his knees coming up to cradle him like: _please_.

Daniel wraps a hand around his shirt collar and kisses back.

Johnny's hand scrambles around to press between them, and at first Daniel thinks he's pushing him away and backs off quick, but the moment there's room to move, he realizes he's trying to get at his shirt buttons. He laughs a little.

“Fucking ruffles,” says Johnny thickly, curling off the ground and holding the position effortlessly, like he's got GI Joe abs or something, oh wait. Johnny blinks in concentration, oblivious to Daniel's regard. “Like trying to get into a bank vault, what the shit.”

Daniel sits up fully and impatiently hauls the shirt over his head. It barely clears before Johnny is over him, pressing him into the grass with another kiss. He gets a leg between Daniel's and Daniel reaches down to grab his ass through the horrible polyester bell bottoms, urging him on. His free hand pulls Johnny's shirt up from his trousers, shoving. He wants to feel his skin against his chest, is hungry for it, hand moving too rough with it.

The kiss turns bruising, their movements sloppy with desperation. They're both hard, burning through their trousers, a terrible, terrific ache.

“You ever think about this,” rasps Daniel, the command in his voice making him sound almost mean, because this is what the other boy always does to him. “Huh, Johnny? You think about it?”

Johnny's teeth scrape his lip. “Shut up,” he says, breathless. And, like it's pouring out of him: “Every fucking night, you little prick.”

Daniel gets a hand in his hair and yanks his head back to attack his throat. He licks the sweat over his pulse, presses his lips there to feel how it pounds for him. Like moving a mountain, he thinks.

Impossible to tell who goes for the belts first, but then they're shoving their trousers down to their thighs, skin burning with the drag of polyester, Daniel's bare ass in the dirt. He's never done this before, and he'll dance naked down Ventura if Johnny has, but between the two of them they work it out: the bump of their wrists, the rhythm.

Johnny tucks his face into Daniel's neck like he can hide from the world, his breathing heavy and almost like a sob in his ear.

Daniel keeps his eyes open the whole time, staring at the tree trunk over flyaway blond strands. When Johnny stiffens and comes over his belly, Daniel reaches up with his free hand and carefully cups the back of his neck, steadying. He closes his eyes and turns his face into his fine, pale hair and lets himself go.

Their breathing afterwards is ragged, almost too loud. Johnny's chest starts to calm against his own. When it feels safe, Daniel uses the hand still around his neck to exert some pressure: turns his face so he can kiss him again.

In the comedown, the kiss feels different. He thinks it must mean something when Johnny kisses back immediately, without reservation. Like Daniel's worked his way to the core of him, uncovered his secret self.

 _Hi_ , thinks Daniel, as he rolls them gently over the grass again. Johnny's hands come up to hold his face, almost reverent, and his eyes are closed. Dreaming. _Hi, there.  
  
_

* * *

  
He wakes up on the ground to the chatter of birds, the pale, blue-tinted sky having turned their dark hideaway in the hills into just another patch of grass. He's stiff and a little cold, wrinkled blue trousers damp and darkened with dew.

He pushes up onto his elbows, face scrunched faintly in confusion.

“Johnny?”

There's no reply. His brain is slow to wake: holding back, reluctant or maybe just protective. Daniel climbs clumsily to his feet. He looks around for some sign of Johnny, but he's long gone. Like maybe at midnight the other boy turned back into a mouse and scurried off. It's just Daniel and the birds out here, high above the valley.

It takes a while for him to fully absorb the undeniable truth of it.

He gathers up the trash under the tree and tosses it in his trunk. He pulls his shirt back on over his chilled skin.

He gets behind the wheel and sits there for maybe ten minutes, staring through the windshield at the steadily warming sky, blinking kinda dumbly. His body feels floaty and weird, like something big has happened but the dust hasn't settled; no telling what the damage is yet.

This feeling clashes with the solitude of the hill, as he realizes he can't even tell anyone about this.

Eventually he drives out. Wind buffeting his hair, stinging his burning eyes. He barely sees the road. He automatically heads for the dojo, because even if he can't tell Mr. Miyagi the truth of what happened, he needs his steadiness, the warm constancy of his presence.

He's eighteen, high school is over, and he's never felt more alone in his entire life.


	23. Chapter 23

Johnny gets stopped for speeding on his way back to his apartment. Daniel passes him and the cop and parks on the side of the street a block and a half up. Johnny waits for the cop to amble up and contemplates the possibility that god does hate gay people.

“You need to be more careful on this street,” says the cop. “You know kids play out here sometimes.”

“Yeah, but it's like, nine o'clock at night,” he says, unthinking.

The cop gives him the ticket.  
  


* * *

  
“Turning into an expensive day for you,” is all Daniel says when they get to his apartment.

Johnny shrugs and puts his shoulder to his door to shove it open. “On the whole, I'm still feeling lucky.” He smirks and Daniel shakes his head a little, biting back something like a smile. He follows Johnny over the threshold.

“You want a drink? I've got,” he tries to remember if any of that Lord Calvert was left, “beer.”

“Hm?” Daniel is turning in place, inspecting the apartment. “Oh, sure.”

He follows him into the kitchen, and Johnny thinks he means something by it, but the man just stands there inspecting the photos on the side of the fridge. Still nosy.

Johnny takes out two Coors and spins the caps off with a hard hard swipe of his thumb. Then he sets them on the counter so he can kiss Daniel, because he's always been a little impulsive and not particularly patient. Daniel's here, they're here, and Johnny sees no reason not to get his hands on him after waiting for so long.

Daniel lets Johnny kiss him and responds just enough to kill any worries about him reading the moment wrong. But he doesn't try to deepen it. This isn't Daniel in the pool, climbing his body in the water; it's Daniel in the changing room afterwards, making a calm decision on his own time. Is it possible for someone to play hard to get when they've already been got? Somehow Daniel manages it, and Johnny can't help but burn a little more for him.

Daniel breaks the kiss and steps back. Holding his gaze, he lifts one of the beers and takes a too-casual drink and backs out of the kitchen. Johnny turns in place to watch him walk over to his armchair.

He sits down, places his beer on the little side table. His hands fall to his belt, and he begins to unbuckle it. Unhurried.

“Come here, Johnny,” he says.

He leaves the beer on the counter. He feels almost high, like he'd taken a long hit off a joint, because time doesn't seem to be working right. He's in the kitchen and then he's in front of the armchair, and he doesn't remember making the crossing. Even his vision's in on it; he can't see anything but Daniel.

Daniel unzips his fly and drags his jeans down just enough to get his dick out, his eyes not leaving him the whole time. And Johnny's with the program, he knows what's happening here and he's for it: he drops to his knees.

But before he can get his hands on him, Daniel grabs them in a tight grip. He looks up and Daniel says, “No touching. Just your mouth.”

“Okay, I get it. You're a control freak,” says Johnny, like his dick isn't already hard and aching because of it.

In response, Daniel tugs him forward by the hands, and he falls over his lap. Catches himself on his elbows and shakes his head slightly to clear it. It doesn't work; inches away and hardening, a pretty dark cock waits for him. For _him_.

“Whenever you like,” says Daniel. He still hasn't let go of Johnny's wrists, but from his tone it's hard to say who is more restrained just then.

Johnny ducks his head and takes him into his mouth. After a couple seconds, Daniel's hands release him in favor of gripping his hair, and he can work with this, yes.

He's always liked giving head, loves the directness of it, the simplicity. He doesn't have to focus on anything but the dick in his mouth and doing his best to make the man fall apart beneath him. It's an exhibition fight, a one-sided match where Johnny is free to pull all his best moves with no opposition. It's sparring with a practice dummy, if the dummy was hot and equipped with a battery pack that made it moan whenever Johnny flattened his tongue over the ridge of his cock head.

“Jesus, look at you,” says Daniel. His hand fold his hair back, like he wants to see his face. “You're good, you're so good.” He almost sounds bitter, Johnny recognizes somewhere in the back of his mind.

He risks moving his hands, folding them around the other man's hips, wanting that little extra bit of connection. He moves up and relaxes his throat and takes him deep, and Daniel's voice cuts sharply off.

After, Johnny carefully lets up on his softening dick and rests his hot cheek along the bare skin of his thigh. He breathes him in deep, content for a moment to rest despite his own dick demanding attention in his jeans.

When he tries to look up at Daniel, the other man gets his hands on his shoulders to forestall him. Daniel tucks himself away but leaves his jeans open and slides out of the chair. He pushes Johnny around until he's sitting back against it on the floor. Then he straddles his legs and says:

“Take it out.” He kisses him and murmurs against his lips, “Go on.”

His head's still buzzing from giving the blowjob, and he has the distinct sulky thought, _why don't_ you _take it out, LaRusso?_ But his hands are already obeying. Daniel watches, unblinking.

After he's shoved his jeans down, Daniel captures his right hand. He brings it up and licks his palm, and Johnny's brain comes alive just enough to realize what he's telling him.

“Oh,” he says, a little weakly, “Oh, c'mon. No, man, c'mon—”

Daniel directs his hand back down and helps fold it around his dick, like someone correcting a grip on a baseball bat. He shifts over Johnny's legs and says, “Trust me,” and, with a significant look, “you gonna take care of that, or what?”

Something of his uncertainty must appear on his face, because Daniel leans forward and kisses him again. His mouth moves over his, slow and firm, and Johnny eventually gives in and starts jerking himself off. He'll take what he can get, and what he's getting is Daniel over him, tasting faintly like Coors. It's almost, but not quite, like sex.

Daniel leans back again on his heels to watch, and Johnny says, “This is a little weird.”

“You're still hard,” he notes.

He's only human, of course he's still hard. “Sure you don't want to give me like, a little shimmy or something?”

Daniel kisses him instead. His hands travel from his shoulders, down his chest and rest at the crease of his thigh and hip. They flex there and Johnny can't help but twitch up a little, desperate for his touch. But Daniel only uses his hands to keep him down.

He makes a jagged sound in his throat and Daniel takes his mouth away. He puts it to his ear and says, “How many times did you do this back then, picturing me?”

“You weren't such a tease in the fantasies,” he says unevenly. Johnny doesn't want to think about back then, not now.

“I'm not teasing,” he says seriously, kissing him again briefly. “Hey, I'm right here. I'm with you.” He hitches himself higher up Johnny's lap, thighs tight over his, close as he can get without interfering with Johnny's movement. Together, their bodies create a shelter for his hand stripping his cock.

Daniel drops his forehead to his shoulder and says, “Show me. I want to see you.”

Together they watch Johnny's hand. Daniel is so close but somehow still impossibly far away, and Johnny's never touched himself and felt more exposed or alone. It's doing his head in, this twisted intimacy. Is it possible to get off on mind games? It would explain a lot about his attraction to him.

Daniel sighs a little and rolls his forehead along his shoulder. He says, “That's right, you're doing so good,” and Johnny's hand jerks a little.

Daniel smiles, and his grip on Johnny's hips tightens. He keeps up the destabilizing talk, the words crowding the air between them, filling up Johnny's head until he can't think. Johnny finally turns his face into his hair, squeezes his eyes shut and comes, the sound of Daniel's warm approval blocking out the rest of the world.


	24. Chapter 24

He doesn't know how long they sit there. Johnny opens his mouth once or twice to say – something; a joke, maybe? – but his mind is a blank slate, Daniel's wiped it clean. He doesn't have the lung capacity to speak anyway; his chest is heaving slightly, hitching like it's got a bad alternator.

It has been, he thinks, a really strange date.

Daniel seems to pick up on his stunned-stupid mood a little, because he doesn't say or do anything that implies he expects Johnny to talk. Instead, he puts an arm around Johnny's shoulder and runs his free hand back through his hair. He does this a couple times, meditative. Like he's stroking him or something. Holding him, Johnny guesses. That's what this is. He's holding him.

A really strange date. He's been fucked by an 8-inch dildo and felt less cracked open. But whatever Daniel's doing, it's working. Johnny's breathing is calming, settling.

“I should get going,” says Daniel after a while. He eases back, sharp eyes studying Johnny a moment and apparently finding satisfaction with whatever he sees there. “I need to get an early start tomorrow.”

Johnny blinks. He clears his throat. “Yeah, that's – yeah, sure. Okay.” He doesn't know what he's saying, but he doesn't think it particularly matters either. Daniel rolls off him and neatly to his feet, setting his appearance to rights with busy hands. He even tucks his shirt back in. Johnny wants to make fun of him for that, but the route between his brain and tongue is not quite up to the task yet.

He stands up, using the armchair for support. His legs are half asleep, and he tries shaking them out subtly. He picks up the beer Daniel abandoned on the side table and takes a long drink.

“This was fun,” says Daniel, but he's using his stranger voice, the one that probably talks about the Dow Jones and knows how to use a fax machine. Johnny hadn't known he hated this voice until now, mostly because he rarely heard it.

He realizes he is staring dumbly at Daniel, who is waiting for a response, eyebrows slightly raised.

“You're such a freak,” he says. He wishes it came out sounding less confused.

Daniel's expression collapses. “Nice, Johnny. Check the manners on you.”

Too much. This is too much. How do people allow this man to walk through the world? “I just sucked your dick, I think we're a little beyond manners, don't you?”

Smugness replaces the annoyance. Both are better than the pod person, but Johnny think he really needs a higher bar here, quick.

“You did suck my dick, didn't you,” says Daniel thoughtfully, walking to the door. He glances back to make sure Johnny is following. “Bet you want to do it again, too.”

What Johnny wants is to rub his tired eyes out of existence. He can't keep up here – his dick can, or it's making a valiant effort, anyway, but his brain is going to call it quits.

“I bet you'd blow me in the park men's if I asked you to.”

And the thing is, he's right. Like, they'd get arrested and maybe even have their names put on some sketchy registry, but Daniel's totally right.

“Hey.” Daniel puts two fingers through the belt loop of his jeans and pulls him in. Johnny's eyes open and he drops the hand from his face. Daniel smiles slightly up at him. “Don't worry. I won't ask. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.”

He squints at his tone. “You quoting a president now or something?”

Daniel's eyelids fall in a slow blink. After a moment he rises up slightly on his toes and kisses him.

“You're so weird,” mumbles Johnny, but he gets an arm around his waist and kisses back.

After Daniel's gone, Johnny turns in place and surveys his living room. He feels like it should be torn apart, a complete wreck, as if a tornado had come through, but the only sign that Daniel was here is the extra beer sitting on the counter over in the kitchen.


	25. Chapter 25

Shannon has a hair appointment or something on Sunday afternoon, so Johnny throws together a couple peanut butter sandwiches, bundles Robby in the car, and drives down to the beach.

It's a beautiful day, and the place is packed with families and hot young things sunbathing or playing games on the baked sand.

Johnny has a strange moment of dissonance walking up the boardwalk, holding Robby's hand with his right and his bag of supplies in his left: realizing he looks like a dad to anyone glancing over. Like, they probably don't even question it. There goes a man and his son.

“You and your mom been down here this season yet?” he asks.

“Once,” says Robby, but he's distracted, craning his neck to the left – not at the ocean rolling out on their right, but to—

Johnny follows his eyes. “Ever been to the skate park?”

“Mom won't let me. And I don't have a skateboard.”

Johnny bites back his first impulse, which is to tell him he can get him one. He can't actually buy one that day; he's broke until next Thursday. He has no idea how much a skateboard even costs, and they probably come with all sorts of pads and shit now too.

Shannon's been at him about promising things and not following through, so. It's fine. He can wait. Mental note: check out how much skateboards cost. Second mental note: talk to Shannon so she doesn't freak the fuck out when he shows up with one. No one wants a repeat of the scooter incident from two years back.

“Well, hey, maybe we'll check it out later,” says Johnny, as a compromise with himself. “Watch them do that cool Tony Hawk shit.”

Robby squints up at him and nods.

They change into their swimsuits and find a patch of free sand high up on the beach, as far from the thick of the crowd as he can manage. Johnny spreads out one of his larger threadbare towels and then makes Robby sit still long enough for him to clumsily spread sunscreen over his pale face and shoulders.

“If you're anything like me, you'll burn easy. Trust me,” he says, wiping an excess glob from the boy's nose.

“I know, Mom always says.” Robby's legs are bouncing in place with the effort to stay put. He wants to go play in the water.

So they do; Johnny wades out until the water's hitting his thighs and spends the next forty minutes acting like a sheepdog with only one sheep, herding Robby through the tide and occasionally tossing him through the shallow water, but only because the boy screams so loudly in delight each time. Johnny's neck and shoulder blades burn because he forgot about them, but it's worth it.

Afterwards they munch through the sandwiches, and he takes out the soccer ball he brought.

“You ever play keep-it-up?” he asks, dropping the ball and catching it on his ankle, “Like, when you're alone? Here, I'll show you.”

I was an only kid too, he doesn't say. Robby's six, after all, and he might have a sibling someday. But still, this feels like something he can pass on, this little piece of his own childhood coping.

Robby's eyes are attentive, watching him juggle the ball. When Johnny asks if he's ready for a turn, he straightens up, almost comically serious. His kid's so serious.

The first couple attempts at passing don't go great, but Robby's stubborn. When they make it to ten in a row, Johnny kicks the ball high and catches it, and swoops down to grab the kid around the waist with his free arm. He spins him in a fast circle, cheering, and Robby kicks and laughs, the sound high and clear as a bell.

He keeps his promise and they walk over to watch the skaters for a while, perched on a bench off to the side. Robby's enamored with the guys doing the flippy shit in the bowls, and Johnny winces a little at what Shannon might say next they talk. That skateboard is looking less optional by the moment.

Sun set finds them on the beach again, dry and back in clothes. Robby's nodding off at his side, a warm bundle under his arm. Johnny watches the evening surfers congregate and disperse into the water, and he thinks.  
  


* * *

  
“Was starting to wonder if I needed to call around to all the hospitals,” says Shannon, when he passes the sleeping kid over. But she doesn't sound seriously pissed, he doesn't think. “What happened to that phone I gave you?”

“Lost the charger,” he says. And when she narrows her eyes: “Hey, I'll get a new one, promise.”

Mental note three: buy another charger for the stupid phone.  
  


* * *

  
It's still not too late when he gets back to his place, so he hurriedly kicks off his sand-encrusted sandals, dumps his bag. He bypasses the fridge with the beer and reaches directly for the phone on the wall. His fingers tap his leg as he dials.

The phone rings.

And rings.

“Hello?”

He stops tapping his fingers and turns to lean against the wall, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder.

“Hey, uh – is this Amanda?”


	26. Chapter 26

Roy Barrett loves the gays.

Some of his best clients are gay. They're always so happy, they know how to party, and best of all: they are truly committed to being fit. Nobody appreciates a well-defined oblique like a gay guy.

Mr. LaRusso is a little strange for a gay. Doesn't seem to quite fit in the usual box. For one, he doesn't dress nearly well enough. For two, he's rarely happy. Or, at least, he hasn't been the couple times he's had a session with Roy.

Roy knows better than to take it personally; getting started on a new fitness regime can be mentally challenging. Everyone expects results overnight.

“You seem kinda tense,” says Roy, bracing the man's leg back against his chest. “Try to relax into the stretch.”

“I know how to stretch, thank you.”

“You don't seem committed to it,” he insists. It's better to push back immediately with new clients, rather than wait for their mistakes to compound and have them turn around and blame him for the results. “Stretching is the most important part of any workout, you know.”

Mr. LaRusso sets his jaw and stares up at the ceiling. After a moment, his legs relax fractionally, and his thigh presses back a little more.

“There you go,” says Roy, encouraging. “And don't forget to breathe.”

“I know how to breathe,” he says. “I do karate.”

Roy says with interest, and some surprise, “Oh, really? Is that how you know John Lawrence?” A thought strikes him, even as Mr. LaRusso jerks slightly in surprise beneath him. “Oh my god, is that how you guys met? Were you in the same karate class when you were kids or something?”

“...No. Not exactly.”

“How are things going with that, by the way? I don't know John that well, our shifts don't overlap much, and he's kinda – well, old school, I guess. Doesn't believe in aerobics, nothing beyond running. A really limited mindset, when it comes down to it. Cardio can be fun. It should be fun, and accessible—”

Mr. LaRusso is staring at him sort of grimly, so he breaks off. Time is up on this leg anyway. He directs him to switch to the other leg.

“Sorry,” he says, “I get a little carried away sometimes. You're not here to hear about my physical fitness ethos.”

“It's alright,” says Mr. LaRusso.

“Anyway, so you and John, how long you been together?”

Mr. LaRusso opens his mouth and then shuts it again. He thinks about it and says eventually, “It's complicated.”

And boy, does Roy get that. “Hey, I hear you, buddy. Dating when you're older _is_ complicated. I mean, I know it is for me. Now that I'm not seeing people on campus every day—”

“Campus?” Mr. LaRusso's face twists slightly. “Wait, how old are you again?”

“Twenty-two.”

“ _Ugh_.” His head thumps back against the floor like he's in terrible pain.

Roy hurriedly releases his leg and bends over him. “What happened? Mr. LaRusso, did you pull something? Mr. LaRusso?”


	27. Chapter 27

He sits in the Starbucks fidgeting, his black coffee (“A tall?” asked the barista; “Twelve ounces, yeah,” he replied, refusing to speak their lingo) sitting mostly untouched at his elbow. When Amanda LaRusso walks in, he straightens up and takes a casual sip like he doesn't hate the taste of the stuff.

“Mr. Lawrence?” she says a couple minutes later, standing in front of his table. She's very put together, like the corporate executive of a villainous company in a nineties movie.

He stands and offers his hand, and she shakes it with the hand not carrying her own drink. Her cup is a lot taller than his, he notices; Starbucks is so stupid.

“Johnny,” he says.

“Right, Johnny. That's right.” She sits across from him at his wave and they look at each other.

Eventually he says, “I get this might seem a little weird.”

She shakes her head. “Weird? A soccer coach who I only know from that one time he drunk-dialed my house hoping to find my ex-husband? Nah. Why would that be weird?”

She smiles, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he remembered exactly what he'd said to the answering machine that night.

“Well, like I told you on the phone – I'm really just looking to get Daniel's number, is all.”

“And I'm looking to satisfy my curiosity. Daniel has always played a lot of stuff close to the vest. I think we can come to some kind of mutually-beneficial arrangement, don't you? ”

“I – don't know?” he says. He's not about to out Daniel to his ex-wife, if that's what's happening here. He doesn't know what their relationship is like, or how custody laws work. He's wishing with every passing second he hadn't had the brilliant idea to call her; he never imagined it would get this complicated.

She takes a drink, sharp eyes not moving from his. “So you and Daniel were in school together. Played soccer, apparently. Did you also do karate?”

He rubs his hand down the side of his jeans. “Yeah, I actually uh – teach karate, still. I mean, now.”

She nods like this is interesting, so very interesting. He can't read anything past that and it's setting him on edge. This must be why the two had married. Who doesn't like a little Russian Roulette with their conversation.

“Did you train with Mr. Miyagi?” she asks.

“No, I was – it was a different dojo.” He looks around the cafe, at all the people with their laptop computers and newspapers and books. How do any of them focus with this terrible music playing overhead?

“Was it Cobra Kai, by any chance?” she asks, and he drags his gaze back to her.

“Yeah, yeah, that's the one,” he says, a little surprised. No one in his karate classes at the Y had ever heard of Cobra Kai, not once in the three years he's been teaching there. It's startling to hear it come out of a stranger's mouth after all this time.

“Did you know Terry Silver?”

He scratches his jaw and shrugs, a little nonplussed. He's forgotten the names of half his classmates from the dojo. There was a high turnover outside of his group; not a lot of kids could cut it under Kreese.

Damn it. He doesn't like thinking about this. He sits forward. After a second, he shoves his coffee to the side, a little annoyed; she watches him do it.

He says, “Look, I don't really – I don't want to rehash all that. So if you're worried I'm trying to mess with him—”

“I'm not,” she says unexpectedly, and he stumbles into silence.

“Oh,” he says after a moment. “Okay?”

“You sounded very earnest on the phone,” she continues.

He hesitates. “Which time?”

“Exactly.” And then maybe she senses he's about to give up on the conversation and make his escape from the whiny alternative music vibes of the cafe, because she sets her own coffee down and changes the subject. “Daniel said you also have a six-year-old? A son, right?”

So they're on parent talk now; he knows he's not getting out of here anytime soon. “Yeah,” he says. “Robby. His mother and I are – separated.” Because that's close enough to the truth, he figures.

So they talk about their kids. Johnny ends up telling her about his dilemma with the skateboard, edging carefully around the bare truth of his checkered record as a father. In turn, he learns that Sam started reading at the age of four and does gymnastics and a little karate on top of the soccer.

“Sounds like a real pistol,” he says.

Amanda smiles in rueful agreement. “Don't know where she gets the energy. I was more of the daydreaming make-believe type at that age.”

“Oh, gotta be Daniel. I can't imagine what kind of terror he was at six. Dealing with him at seventeen was bad enough.”

“Really?” she says, slightly disbelieving. “Daniel? Daniel LaRusso?”

He laughs a little. “Oh, _yeah_. Final game of our regular season, we were all beat, just – dropping dead in the middle of the field. He not only got the assist that won the game, but he spent the next six hours running all the benched players ragged down at the beach at the after party. Middle of the night, everyone else has gone home, and I still have to practically drag the little punk away.”

“I can't picture it,” she says, a strange half-smile on her face.

It brings him back to the present, and he self-consciously clears his throat. Sits back. “Yeah, well,” he says. “People change, I guess.”

She watches him a moment longer, and he tries his best not to look like a man kind of hung up on a guy he knew in high school. Fixes his expression, picks up his coffee and takes a drink and doesn't grimace at the taste.

“So, you want that phone number?” she asks.

He looks up and smiles.


	28. Chapter 28

That same night finds him at his kitchen table with the note Amanda had given him. He flicks it across the tabletop with his thumbnail, indecisive. He drinks his beer. He gets bored with the the back-and-forth of his thoughts and impulsively stands and crosses to the phone.

The phone rings twice and Johnny considers the possibility that Amanda gave him a fake number. She seemed to like him fine, but she also seemed like the kind of person who liked to mess with people as a way of showing affection. And it's not like she knew the stakes involved. She could give him the wrong number, not realizing that she was essentially cockblocking her ex-husband; though now that Johnny's thinking about it like that, he realizes if she _did_ know, she could've definitely done it on purpose, because who likes to think about their ex moving on and netting a hot piece of ass like him—

“Hello?” says Daniel in his ear. He sounds a little distracted.

Johnny leans back against the wall. “Hey,” he says, smile in his voice. He waits half a second and adds, “This is, uh—”

“Johnny.” Nothing but surprise in his voice, and that's not a bad sign, not yet. “How did you get this number?”

And maybe he doesn't know this version of Daniel that well, but he doesn't think the man would react great to know Johnny had coffee with his ex-wife. Dude is kinda paranoid, he'd probably blow a gasket.

“I have my methods,” he says, mysterious.

“Methods.”

“Yeah. I think you'll find I'm very resourceful.”

“You called up the summer rec office, didn't you.”

Shit, that was an option? Johnny makes a face at the linoleum. “I'll never tell.”

“I don't know how I feel about this,” says Daniel, though he sounds only a little amused and not like he suspects Johnny's been stalking him in an elaborate plan to ruin his life. This is definitely progress from a week ago. “I mean, now that you know how to contact me outside of youth soccer practices. Think we might be rushing things a bit?”

Johnny makes a considering noise, but he's grinning so hard his face hurts. He's suddenly glad they're doing this over the phone, and he doesn't have to worry about looking like an idiot. Where the fuck did his cool go? He used to be so cool.

“If you're worried about it, I guess we could wait another decade. I'm sure all this will be much easier with teenagers running around instead of six-year-olds.”

“Christ, don't even joke about that,” says Daniel. “Sam's never going to be a teenager. It's a rule I made. She agreed, even pinky swore to it. That's ironclad.”

“Well, Robby's going to be amazing as a teenager. He'll be like, one of those kids who does it all: sports, classes—”

“You know everyone's supposed to do classes, right, like. That's not an optional part of high school.”

“Shut up, you know what I mean. He'll be out there doing all that nerdy shit while also killing it in soccer and whatever else he ends up doing.” He didn't even realize he'd been thinking about this until it comes out of his mouth, but abruptly he can see it all, and it's kind of exciting. If he doesn't fuck it up, he'll even get to see it.

“Jesus, listen to you,” says Daniel. “Proud father Johnny Lawrence.” But he says it softly, not mocking. In the background of the call, a car drives by: tires creaking over asphalt, an engine with a misfiring cylinder or something squealing high and constant.

“Where are you right now?” he asks, because strange things are happening in his stomach, and he needs to back off the moment, pronto.

“I... am leaning against a wall.”

“Hey, me too.”

“Look at how much we have in common,” says Daniel dryly. And then: “Hey, um – so you. You're out at work? I mean, you're – aware of that, right?”

“I didn't fill out a form or check a box or anything,” says Johnny. “But yeah, I guess.”

“Right, sure. But is that a recent thing, or...?”

Johnny shrugs even though Daniel can't see it. “I don't know, been a while. Words gets around, you know how it goes. Diane – the woman at the front desk you tried tricking—”

“I didn't _trick_ her.”

“Anyway, she kind of thinks I'm going to hell.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, but like, she's nice about it? And she's always on me about drinking, says she's worried for my health and well-being.”

“Probably wants to prolong your earthly existence before you burn for all eternity with the rest of the sinners.”

“Yeah, something like that,” he agrees, easy.

It feels nice to joke about it. The one time he tried telling Bobby, the man had grown stiff and furious, and Johnny had to spend forty minutes talking him down from driving over the next day. Watching a priest dropkick a receptionist probably would've been _hilarious_ , so Johnny hopes Bobby remembers the sacrifices he's made next time he fucks up.

“I can't get over how weird it is,” says Daniel quietly. “I mean – you, being so comfortable with all this. I know it's been forever, but still.”

Johnny really hates remembering a lot of what happened at the end of high school. He thinks about the kid he was and feels embarrassed. Sometimes he's even angry with him, thinking he shouldn't have been so weak, shouldn't have cared so much about shit assholes say or think. But mostly, he just pities him.

His heart is beating fast, and he recognizes why; it's the heady feeling he gets when he realizes he's about to do or say something really reckless.

“It's kinda thanks to you, man,” he says. He knocks his heel restlessly against the floor trim. “You led the way. I wouldn't – I don't know what it would've been like. If I hadn't met you back then, I mean.”

He listens to Daniel breathe on that, and then something happens, and the line drops to a hum of dead air. Johnny stares at nothing. He realizes the other man has hung up. He is slow in replacing the receiver on the hook.

Behind him, across the room, there is a knock on his door.


	29. Chapter 29

Ten paces and he's not thinking. Another knock comes before he gets to the door, and that's how he knows it's Daniel, even before he opens it. No one else would be this impatient, or demanding. Not at ten o'clock on a Monday night; not at Johnny's door. He thinks about waiting to see if he'll knock again, maybe even timing it, but it's a distant, childish impulse and swiftly overruled by the rest of him.

He hauls the door to the apartment open, and Daniel looks up. Hand already raised again.

Johnny doesn't fight the smirk, though it's more difficult to keep it from widening into something else.

Daniel's in a blue plaid shirt and jeans, normal clothing for once. Like he'd been sitting around at home for a while before deciding he had to drive over here. His eyes are doing some quick work, shifting from nervous to recognition; he catches Johnny's expression and they flick away before coming back hot and dark.

He steps inside, narrow shoulders turning on an invisible hinge connected to Johnny's chest. He closes the door with a firm hand.

Hard to say who directs who through the apartment. Johnny's walking backwards, pace slow enough to keep contact with the hand on his chest, five point pressure burning through his shirt. Daniel's stride is unchecked as he pushes forward. They pass down the unlit hallway to his bedroom.

Daniel's hand falls down his chest to his belt, and he drags Johnny stumbling half a step forward into an open kiss that lasts all of a second before he's tearing away, moving on, pulling Johnny's shirt over his head.

He shrugs it off, hands reaching out to reciprocate but evaded like it's a match, and he's already down a point.

Johnny is shoved down on the bed, and Daniel stands over him, folding up his shirtsleeves. He tips his chin up meaningfully, and just like they never needed words to understand each other on a field, he doesn't need any spoken direction now.

Johnny works his fly open and lifts his hips, kicking his boxers and jeans off. He can't stop looking at Daniel waiting at the edge of the bed. His dick is already hard; he watches the other man's attention turn to it and curls his hands into fists at his sides to stop from reaching out.

He lies there, exposed and waiting. The muscles above his knees jump and relax, and his skin prickles over. He's running his air conditioning too much.

Daniel reaches down and curls a hand around one of his ankles. His thumb rubs the jutting bone just below where his leg hair ends, and then he eases his hand up, over his calf muscle. His palm covers his kneecap, and Johnny knows the other man can feel the slight uncontrollable tremble now, there's no hiding how much Johnny's holding himself back from moving.

Daniel's mouth curves in a smile, and god, what a dick. What a beautiful, infuriating, confusing _dick_.

Impulse strikes first, and Johnny a second later. He's just passing it along. Can't blame the rod for the lightning. He brings his legs up and pulls Daniel in, rolling them over.

Daniel fetches up on one of the pillows, dark head tossed against the white sheets, eyes flying wide and not a little bad-tempered. But he doesn't do anything except curl a hand into Johnny's hair and pull him down into a biting kiss.

It's all fair game now, Johnny thinks, and he wastes no time finally getting his hands on him, sliding beneath the soft cotton of his shirt to get at all that smooth, warm skin.

Daniel surges up against him at the first brush against his ribs, his tight nipple. He makes a quiet noise, quickly cut off, and Johnny feels it echo through his head like a stone tossed down a well. Come on, _come on._

Daniel turns his head, breaking the kiss. He breathes deep through his nose, throat working. His eyes are closed tightly, long lashes a shadow above his cheeks. Johnny moves along and kisses the juncture of his jawline and neck.

He doesn't resist when Daniel's hands start pushing again, reclaiming control. The other man shifts up the bed, makes Johnny sit up until he's straddling his chest. He drags his palms up Johnny's thighs to his hips, licks his bottom lip. Eyes flicker up to meet his.

Johnny shakes his head slightly, more asking for confirmation than denying, but Daniel's expression shuts down all further communication. His hands cover the swell of Johnny's ass, and he curls forward to take the tip of his cock into his mouth.

Johnny's hands slap the wall above the bed.

Later he'll find a slight crack in the plaster.

Before that, he'll let Daniel push him off and kiss him boneless into the mattress, the taste of himself on the other man's tongue.

He'll fumble a hand down to the front of Daniel's jeans, dumbly desperate to give something back, but find the hot damp spot of pleasure already taken: snatched from him on the sly. Daniel's hand will catch his and hold it tightly for a second before slipping away. He will sit at the edge of the bed with ruffled hair and swollen lips and look over his shoulder at Johnny, memorizing or maybe just reflecting, and then he'll stand and leave, having never even taken off his shoes.

And Johnny will stare up at the dark ceiling of his bedroom and say, “What the fuck.”


	30. Chapter 30

Rick likes to arrive early to the soccer practices, because usually by the time the afternoon rolls around on weekdays he starts contemplating truly grim possibilities, like taking that contract job for Intel up in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Going to the park makes him feel useful, at least. It allows him to focus on Demetri's emotional and physical development, which Krissy spends hours worrying over in that distant, abstracted way of all psychologists.

 _He passed the ball today_ , he'll say to her at dinner.

She'll turn to their son and ask, _And how did this voluntary relinquishing of the source of attention make you feel_ , _Demetri?_

 _Relieved?_ Demetri will say, and Rick will wish for a very, very brief moment that he was a little more like Coach Lawrence, and could parcel out physical affection with ease, because he's never identified with his son more.

Going to the park on a regular basis also lets him feel plugged into the local community, or at the very least, the local community's mundane dramas.

He's been quietly subscribed to the feud between two lifelong best friends for a couple weeks now; they both got pregnant with their first child at the same time, but one is expecting a second while the other's husband is cheating, and both women think the other isn't being sufficiently emotionally supportive.

There is the young couple always on the verge of breaking up while pushing their toddler at the swings. Rick thinks they might even still be teenagers; something about the girl's makeup, the boy's mannerisms, the way they talk like they don't fully understand the other person is as real and independent an actor at themselves. He feels a little bad for the kid.

Then there is Coach Lawrence's bully.

He shows up early too, more often than not. He's always alone with his daughter, and Rick can't figure out if he's married. No ring, so the odds are against it. But he doesn't act like a single man; he seems too – somber, or something, and he never looks at any of the other parents with any sort of interest, even in passing.

Look at him; he's trying to psychoanalyze strangers in the park now. It's not even his field. He mentally commits to talking to a headhunter that evening. He knows opening this door will mean getting twenty calls a day from crap companies promising basement salaries that would've made him laugh in college, but he's got to do something.

In the meantime, he decides to talk to the bully.  
  


* * *

  
“Hello,” he says, walking up with his hand outstretched. This is something men their age do, right? “You're another parent coach, right? Richard Martin.”

“Daniel LaRusso,” says the man, sharp eyes cataloging him. He shakes hands like he's more used to it than Rick, but doesn't try to break his hand like Coach Lawrence. “And you – help out Johnny Lawrence with the Reseda team.”

“Assistant Coach, yes,” he says.

“Assistant Coach,” says Daniel with a slight smile. “Where do I get one of those? It's just me with my little monsters.”

“Do you know any unemployed engineers? Always a solid bet.”

“Let's see, it's Home Depot for construction help – where do you guys hang out, Best Buy?” And while Rick tries to work out if that crossed over into being offensive, Daniel turns back to the playground and waves. “So which one of these is yours?”

“Oh, uh – Demetri, the boy with the brown hair, there,” he says, pointing to where his son is bent over some kind of dead June bug. A smaller boy with a cleft lip scar is with him, and they seem to discussing the situation of the dead bug quite intently.

“How about you?” he asks, even though he already knows it's the tiny terror hosting court over inside the half dome.

“Sam,” says Daniel, gesturing.

Rick nods. They both put their hands in their pockets and survey the playground for a while in silence.

“So,” he says finally, “I gather you've known Coach Lawrence a long time?”

Daniel's mouth indents at one corner. “A long time ago, more like.”

“Right, right. One of those things, got it. It's funny,” he says, “how some part of high school can stay with you. You think – oh, I'm thirty, I'm forty, I've got a family and a career. But then maybe you bump into someone you knew, or something comes along and reminds you and – it's all still kinda there, isn't it? And maybe that makes you feel – trapped?”

Daniel turns slightly and looks at him, unreadable except for the slightly insulting arch of his eyebrows. “Are you having issues, Richard?”

“Who, me? No.”

“Okay,” says Daniel easily, looking back to the playground.

He tries again. “It's only, you know – it's an illusion. A memory. It doesn't have to mean anything more than we let it. So if, to pick a completely random example, maybe you see someone you used to pick on? And maybe you're, I don't know, having a rough time of it in your personal or professional life,” and now Daniel is staring at him, and hey, this guy can actually look a little intimidating when he wants to, no wonder Coach Lawrence is so worried, “and maybe those old impulses come back, feel like some kind of solution? You want to lash out, you think that'll make you feel better, but—”

“Hang on,” says Daniel, hands coming out of his pockets as he turns full-body to stand in front of Rick. They're of a similar height, but somehow Daniel manages like he's leaning over him. “Are you insinuating I'm a _bully_? Is that what's happening here?”

“Er,” says Rick.

Daniel raises his chin: eyes narrowing, a strange light in his eyes. “What has Johnny told you, exactly?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. He really wants to back up a step, but he knows that only encourages further aggression. “Nothing at all, it's my mistake. Ignore me.”

 _How was the park today?_ Krissy might ask that night.

And maybe he'll say, _I almost got my ass kicked by a scary man in North Face trackpants._

_And did that bring any old feelings of helplessness rushing back?_

_Rushing back?_ he'll think. _Like they ever went away?_


	31. Chapter 31

On Tuesday, he spends the morning debating with himself before breaking and calling Bobby right before leaving for practice. It rings twice as he paces the length of the wall and then Bobby answers.

“Hey, Johnny, you're—”

“I think Daniel LaRusso is using me for sex.”

“—on speakerphone,” Bobby finishes, voice full of regret.

“I'll uh, leave you to it?” says a woman in the background.

Johnny cringes at the wall. He imagines Bobby is making an identical expression somewhere across the city.

“Why would you lead with that?” demands Bobby after a couple seconds, presumably by which point he is alone. “Who taught you to talk on the phone, Johnny?”

“Why did you have me on speakerphone?” he says loudly back, “I didn't ask for that, I couldn't've known.”

“Well, I was about to tell you, if you'd given me the chance. My hands were full of bread dough, I couldn't handle the phone.”

Johnny stops pacing, eyes narrow; grin forming. “Bread dough, huh.”

He sighs. “It's not—”

“And it's, let's see – past noon. Oh holy shit, you're breaking your vows with the bakery chick again.”

“I never took any vows.”

“Doing a little kneading in the daylight, huh.” Johnny leans against the wall, enjoying himself. “A little rolling and stuffing. Spreading the icing. Preparing that cream filling—"

So Bobby hangs up on him before they can talk about his problem with LaRusso, but it's fine. It's totally fine. Johnny can figure this out on his own. He resolves not to have sex with Daniel again until they've talked and hashed things out. There: simple.  
  


* * *

  
They sidle warily up to each other over the grass, with the fractious sounds of children yelling for the ball in the background.

“Johnny.”

“Daniel.”

The other man continues to smile-not-smile at him, and maybe Johnny likes looking at the guy, but it's starting to get a little weird. He's acting like he's pissed, which makes no sense – if anything, Johnny should be the one who's pissed. But before he can point this out, Daniel speaks again:

“I'm just going to come out and ask.”

Johnny shoots him a quick finger gun. “Too late, but don't let it stop you.”

Daniel's smile tightens, and he tips his head, eyes narrow. “Have you been telling people I bullied you in high school?”

“What?” This isn't remotely close to what he was expecting, and he has to reel his mind back from his prepared arguments about the importance or reciprocity in oral sex. “Uh, no? Where'd you get—” and here, he catches sight of Coach Martin directing the kids in a short passing drill, and it all makes a terrible sort of sense. “Oh, Coach Martin. You talk to him or something?”

Daniel nods and folds his arms, waiting.

Johnny waves. “Don't worry about him.”

“Don't worry?”

He spins the ball in his hand and tries to explain. “I mean, don't take it personally. You shouldn't listen to what he says. Tell you the truth, I don't think the guy's very smart.” When Daniel continues to stare, he elaborates: “He doesn't even have a job, man.”

“I'm confused how the subject even came up.”

Ah. “Ah.”

When in doubt, or in an uncomfortable conversation, Johnny usually goes for brutal honesty. It usually unbalances the adversary enough that he can escape the situation relatively unscathed. He tries this tactic now.

“I told him you made my life a living hell – hey, wait,” he says, putting a hand out to forestall the other man walking away.

Daniel looks down at the hand on his arm, unreadable, but you know what? The man knows fucking karate, he can remove it if he feels that strongly about it. If Johnny heeded every pissy look Daniel sent him, they would never have even kissed.

“What I meant when I said that,” he says deliberately, risking a slight step forward, “is that you drove me crazy. You did, you _know_ you did. And you still do, and I think you know that too.”

Daniel's eyes meet his.

“But I think you like it,” says Johnny.

They hold like that for a couple seconds. Then Daniel turns his arm over and captures Johnny's hand. He doesn't look angry anymore, and he's not doing that weird not-smiling thing. His expression is blank, but his ears are a little red.

“Of course, I couldn't explain all that to my assistant coach,” continues Johnny, because now it is either ramble or kiss him in front of the whole park. “That would be unprofessional.”

He smiles a little, and his finger strokes over Johnny's pulse in his wrist. “Unprofessional, huh.”

“Yeah.”

“And you're very concerned about what's professional,” he says.

He's not sure what they're talking about anymore. His mouth is very dry. “It's – important. So important.”

“Johnny, you remember what I said last week, about the park Men's?” Daniel drops his hand and takes a step back. He's got a look on his face like he's about to slide in and take out a taller player's legs, never mind the risk of being trampled in the process.

Reckless was always irresistible on him.

Daniel smiles and puts his hands in his pockets as he backs away. “Let's say – ten minutes?” And he doesn't wait for Johnny to respond before turning and walking off.  
  


* * *

  
Johnny sets up a shooting drill, half-blind and half-deaf, and then excuses himself to use the restroom. As he approaches, he considers his recent luck and the odds of some beer gut geriatric occupying the urinals, but when he walks in, there's no one but Daniel inside.

Daniel, who immediately pushes him back against the door to stop it from opening again, and rises up to kiss him like he's dying for it.


	32. Chapter 32

That night, after driving Robby home and failing to avoid one of those random eruptive fights he and Shannon get into sometimes, Johnny meets Bobby for beers at their usual sports bar. Bobby is in a tolerant mood, which means he absolutely got laid by the bakery chick; Johnny decides not to comment on it, because he wants Bobby to stay that way. He needs advice, like, bad.

Earlier, Daniel had made good on his promise to have Johnny suck him off, and then he plastered himself to Johnny's back while jerking him in front of the bathroom mirror. And then he muttered something about getting over to his practice and fucking left again while Johnny's dick was still out.

Johnny hasn't been this turned on and confused all the time since he was a teenager, and it doesn't escape his notice that Daniel LaRusso was to blame back then too.

Bobby sets two pints down on the table, and Johnny takes a healthy gulp of his before sitting forward.

“I need a game plan here. Like, ASAP because I'm losing my mind.”

He puts a hand up to slow him down. “What's the issue? Be specific, but not – you know,” he looks at him warily, “too specific.”

“Okay, well. I need to preserve the sex, because it's really hot, but cut out the weird parts—”

Bobby grimaces. “I just told you, I really don't want to know—”

“No, not weird like fun, Bobby. Grow up. I mean, weird where he gets uptight and cold and then _leaves_ every time.”

Comprehension chases the look from his face. “He leaves?” Johnny nods. “Hm, I see.” He taps his fingers and thinks about this, eventually asking, “Have you considered asking him to stay?”

“Asking him to stay.”

“Yes. Adult can do that, you know.”

Johnny ignores the commentary and takes another drink. “Bobby, you're a genius.”

“I have doubts in your criteria, but I'll take the compliment,” he says dryly.

“It's so obvious. Of course. I've been letting him call all the shots, but if I do it, if I _ask him to stay_ , he'll have to either own up being weird, or – he'll stay. Either way: I win, he loses.”

The other man hesitates over his upturned glass. “I don't think that's the best way to look at it. Not everything in life is about winning or losing, Johnny. I thought we both learned that long ago.”

“No, trust me, that's exactly the way he'll look at it.”

“Really? You're sure,” he says, doubtful.

“One hundred percent.”

Bobby looks like he doesn't know whether to feel depressed or philosophical. “Maybe I was wrong,” he muses. “Maybe you're meant for each other.”

“Right?” Johnny grins, then his hands drop and flatten against the table as he replays Bobby's words. He leans forward. “Wait. Do you think I should get serious and ask him to, like....” He tried to communicate _go steady_ with his eyebrows, because he doesn't know if people still use that term in their forties. The closest he's ever come to a long term adult relationship is Shannon, and even then only if you count all the days cumulatively and not consecutively.

Bobby shakes his head slightly, not getting it. “Get married?”

“No! Jesus. Wait.” Johnny checks, “We can do that?”

“Jury's out,” says Bobby. “Kind of literally.” And: “Why do I know more about this than you?”

He shrugs and sits back, and his eye catches on an extremely hot and extremely familiar babe sitting over at the bar. Without thinking, he leans out of the booth and calls:

“Amanda!”

Her perfectly coiffed head comes up and she looks around slowly, clearly startled at having her name shouted across the room. Not a regular of the sports bar scene, he thinks.

Her eyes land on him and he grins and waves. A second into it, the wave turns into an enthusiastic beckon.

Amanda blinks at him. She takes a measured drink from her fancy glass – he didn't even know this place had those, huh – and looks like she's considering her options. To be fair, she probably has many. She is wearing a knock-out dress, just way too good for this place, what the hell.

“Do you actually know that woman, or have recent events caused you to regress to the scumbag days of your twenties?” asks Bobby.

“I know her,” he defends. “That's LaRusso's ex-wife.” And while Bobby's eyes are widening in horror, and he's frantically trying to get Johnny to drop his hand, he calls again across the room, coaxing, “C'mon, you know you want to.”

She says something to the bartender and slips off her stool. Heels too, damn. He bets she and Daniel set the bed on fire when they fucked.

“Johnny, this is a surprise,” she says, arriving at the end of the table. She doesn't sit, but he thinks she looks a little relieved around the eyes. Sitting alone in a place like this could not be fun.

“I'll say. What is a classy person like yourself doing here?”

She flashes a tight smile. “Getting stood up, as it happens.”

Johnny slaps the table. “What, that's insane. You're way too hot to be stood up.” He realizes this could sound sticky, and rushes to add, “I can say that, because I'm in gay mode – he'll confirm,” with a wave to Bobby, who quickly clarifies that he, himself, is not gay, and it's lovely to meet you, my name's— “Otherwise, nothing but respect from this corner.”

He's starting to realize the four beers he had before Bobby arrived are maybe affecting him a little.

“I don't know how well you two know each other,” Bobby says to her, “but I feel like I should apologize for him anyway. Would you like to join us? I could use some grown-up conversation.”

Johnny's already moving over in the booth. “Ignore him, he loves me. If he liked dick, we would've already adopted two dogs.”

Amanda slides on the seat, smoothing out the high hem of her dress. “I take it you two are old friends.”

“High school buddies,” confirms Johnny.

She hesitates, eyes flicking between them. “Oh, so you know—”

“Yeah, he knows Daniel.” Does she find it weird that Johnny guessed what she was going to say? He occupies himself with his pint to cover the moment.

“How is Daniel these days?” asks Bobby, doing an amazing job of pretending they hadn't just been talking about how fucking infuriating the man was right before she sat down.

A waitress arrives with another martini for Amanda, and she accepts it with a grateful smile. Turning back, she says, “They say divorce makes people act strange, and I guess they aren't wrong. Didn't see kiddie soccer playing a role, but – sure. Now me, I restrict myself to feuding with the teller at our commercial bank, like an adult.”

Perhaps rightfully concerned that Johnny is going to burst something trying not to demand details about everything Daniel says about the soccer league, Bobby skillfully turns the conversation away from divorces and feuds.

When the waitress comes around again, they get another round.


	33. Chapter 33

He wakes up on Wednesday with a hangover and a new mantra. The latter is scrawled across his bathroom mirror in shaving cream, so he guesses his drunk self meant business.

The mirror says: let's have dinner and talk.

He vaguely remembers Amanda the previous night, vehemently insisting on the importance of talking: _be up front about it, don't surprise him. Let him know what to expect, Johnny: dinner and a conversation_. And he remembers at some point switching to shots to overcome the guilt and awkwardness of her not knowing she was giving advice about her ex-husband.

He pisses for a long time into the toilet bowl and squints at the message, wondering why he'd thought it so vital and groundbreaking as to deserve the shaving cream treatment. Messages in mirrors should be reserved for like, death omens or murder clues. This isn't anything he didn't already know.

Daniel appears in the mirror behind the message.

Johnny jumps, knocking the toilet roll and can of shaving cream off the counter.

“Holy shit,” he says, spinning in place to make sure the other man isn't, in fact, a ghost. He breathes and narrowly avoids clutching his chest like a man having a heart attack. “Holy shit, what the fuck.”

“What the fuck indeed, what's wrong with you?” Daniel looks at the mirror, and his eyebrows go up as he takes in the message.

“How long have you been here?” he demands, wondering: just how drunk was I last night?

Daniel drags his eyes away from the mirror with seeming difficulty. “Like – thirty seconds? You weren't answering the door, and then I noticed it wasn't fully closed. You know you don't live in a great neighborhood, right? You should lock your door, Johnny.”

Johnny sits on the toilet and rubs his face.

“So,” says Daniel, leaning in the doorway like he can just skip over the freakishness of showing up unannounced in a man's bathroom at seven in the morning, “who's the lucky ghost asking you to dinner? Is this a Swayze thing?”

Johnny spreads the fingers around his eyes so he can glare up at him. “Why are you here, LaRusso?” he mumbles into his palms. His face feels like it's approaching some kind of critical meltdown temperature.

In response, Daniel reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a – charger? He tosses it at Johnny, who grabs it out of the air. He frowns at it and then frowns at Daniel.

“It's for your Motorola,” says Daniel. “So you can, you know, actually use the cell phone you own, stop being chained to your kitchen wall.”

“Maybe I like being chained to my kitchen wall,” he says absently, turning it over in his hands. He blinks up at Daniel, suddenly conscious that he is only in his boxers.

Daniel seems conscious of it too. He looks him over and scratches his jawline, eyes bouncing between the mirror and Johnny.

“Well,” he says, “I happened to see it in the store this morning, and figured – why not.”

His hands tighten over the charger. “Why not?”

“And it seems like I was just in time, given your,” and he waves at the mirror. His mouth is fighting a smirk and losing, badly. He rocks back on his heels; Johnny's thighs tense, preparing. “Anyway, good luck with – whoever you want to talk to—”

And then he's out of the room like a shot and Johnny's off the toilet, giving chase.

He catches the man in the living room around the middle, and hauls him around and down onto the sofa. They land with a thump of cushions and sharp burst of laughter.

Daniel's hands skate down his sides, even as he's saying, “I can't stay.”

“What else is new,” says Johnny, slipping a hand up into his suit jacket, down the back of his trousers. Squeezing. He kisses him and says, “Have dinner with me? Tomorrow?”

“You're having dinner with Shannon and your son tomorrow,” says Daniel.

Shit, that's right. Then Johnny draws back and says, baffled, “How do _you_ know that? First you show up in my bathroom, now you know my schedule?”

“You got me, I'm stalking you,” says Daniel. He nudges his knee up, firm, against Johnny's dick. “Or Shannon mentioned it to me yesterday, you jackass. I'm detail-oriented, so sue me.”

He curls forward to nip at his earlobe and says, “Well, since you and Shannon are such good friends – have dinner with us.”

“What, you, me, your ex and your son?”

Johnny shrugs.

“I'll think about it,” says Daniel, and then extricates himself from Johnny's arms with effort, completely ignoring his complaints. He stands over the sofa, straightening his suit and watching with dark eyes as Johnny's hand drops down to console his cruelly abandoned dick.

Daniel clears his throat and gives him a meaningful look. “Refill your phone's minutes. You don't want me or someone trying to contact you for something important and get the default voicemail.”

Johnny stretches lazily and keeps jerking off. “If you're going to start calling me all the time, I don't know if I can buy enough minutes to keep up with your mouth."

“Oh, please,” says Daniel, still intent on leaving despite the half-hard dick Johnny can see through his slacks, “like I couldn't make you come in less than five.”


	34. Chapter 34

Robby's not entirely sure he doesn't turn invisible when no one's looking at him.

He hasn't figured out how to test it yet, or what he'll do with this superpower if it's real. Maybe sneak out of the apartment he shares with his mom, go down to the corner store at the end of the block and lift one of those magazines about video games he'll probably never get to play.

One place he knows he's not invisible is the soccer field – unless the other team's dad is around. Then it doesn't matter if he gets the ball into the net or does a handstand, his dad still won't see it.

So when that man shows up to his mom and dad dinner night, Robby's kinda unhappy about it.

“Hello, Robby,” says the man. He puts out his hand. “I'm Mr. LaRusso.”

“Don't call him that. Call him Daniel,” Dad says to him. And to the man: “Are you trying to shake my kid's hand? What's the matter with you?”

“I don't believe in talking down to kids.”

“Why not? You talk down to everyone else.”

“Robby, go wash up,” says Mom, steering him out of the kitchen.

During dinner, the adults all talk about boring stuff he doesn't understand, and he gives up listening pretty quick. He chases his spaghetti around his plate and tries to make shapes with the sauce. He doesn't eat much until Daniel notices and makes a big deal about showing him how to spin his fork through the spaghetti.

“Like this?” he says, lifting his fork, which now resembles a drumstick made of noodles.

Daniel smiles. “Exactly like that. You're a natural.”

“Robby's going to end up with better table manners than me,” says Dad.

“Too late,” says Mom and Daniel, and the adults all laugh a little and they go back to talking about boring stuff.

“You should bring Sam next time,” says Mom, and Robby perks up a little, because he knows that name. It belongs to the bossy girl who pushed him down a slide a while ago. He doesn't know if he likes Sam, but at least she's not boring. Robby doesn't get to spend a lot of time with other kids outside of school, so he'll take what he can get.

“I'm, uh. Taking things a little slow, with her,” says Daniel. Robby watches his free hand flicker over the table, index finger and thumb pressing together; opening up; pressing together. “She still doesn't really get that her mom and I aren't ever going to live together again.”

Mom and Dad exchange looks. Robby thinks about bending his fork like a catapult and flinging sauce at the wall, but he doesn't do it. Yet.

After dinner, Daniel insists on washing the dishes, and Dad helps Robby build a Duplo tower.

“How high you wanna make it?”

“Tall as you,” says Robby, pressing the blocks down. Building a solid base is important, he learned that long ago.

“As tall as me, I don't know, man. I think that's a little ambitious for Duplo. Sure you don't want to go as tall as Daniel?” He pitches his voice a little louder. “He's shorter, it's much more doable.”

Robby doesn't understand why he's talking about Daniel again. “No,” he says stubbornly. “You.”

After a while, Daniel leaves and Dad walks out with him, saying he'll be back up to help finish the tower and then tuck Robby into bed. Mom goes into her bedroom with a glass of wine, and Robby abandons his pile of Duplo to go over to the window in the living room.

Down on the street, his dad and Daniel lean up against a car, talking. Daniel says something and shakes his head, and his dad throws his head back like he does every time Demetri has the ball in a game.

His dad touches Daniel's elbow, then his hip. He leans forward to say something into his ear, and Daniel nods and says something back. Their faces are very close. Robby wonders if they're whispering secrets, and what the secrets are. No one tells him anything.

Eventually Daniel gets into his car and drives off, and his dad watches the darkening street for a while. Robby watches him until he's sure he's going to come back up like he said he would, and then he returns to his tower.


	35. Chapter 35

On Saturday, Johnny waves at Amanda across the field and Daniel, straightening up from helping his daughter with her shoes, catches it. He frowns and says something to her; she replies back with slight laugh and Johnny just about dies from a need to know what they're saying.

“Do you ever feel like you should be able to will yourself the power of teleportation? Like if you think about it hard enough?” he says to Shannon.

“All the time,” she says.

“Yeah.” He watches Daniel detach himself from his family. “Hey, uh – watch Robby a moment? I'll be right back.” He starts forward, casually walking along the edge of the field.

Daniel is looking down at his phone when Johnny approaches, and he thinks it's supposed to be some kind of cover at first, secret agent type shit, until Daniel says:

“You know, when you charged your phone up, I wasn't expecting you to use it to send me ten messages in a row asking, and I quote, _what letter-r letter-u wearing_.”

“I can see why you never responded,” says Johnny, tilting his head. “What are those, Dockers?”

The offended look that comes across his face is pretty funny. “They are _not_ — look, can you just. Act like an adult, maybe?”

“Sorry if I'm not treating our six-year-olds' soccer game with the right amount of seriousness.” Johnny pauses and looks at him from the corner of his eye. He clears his throat, a little hopefully. “...Does this mean we're not making another bet?”

Daniel shoves his hands in his pockets, looking annoyingly sure of himself. “What's there to bet? You've already shown that you're willing to drive across town and blow me if I ask you to.”

See if Johnny ever gives him another TGIF blow job in the parking garage down the street from the man's apartment.

He mirrors Daniel's stance and says casually, “There are other stakes we haven't explored. Like – winner gets to fuck the loser – or gets fucked, you know, whatever your preference.” He figures he knows what Daniel's preference is, but still. Johnny's flexible and always likes to assume others are too.

It takes a few seconds for Johnny to realize Daniel hasn't responded. He turns his head and looks at the other man's fixed expression.

“I haven't,” says Daniel. “I'm mean, I'm not.”

“Uh,” says Johnny. Words would be helpful right now, but he doesn't seem to remember any.

“It's not that I'm opposed,” Daniel says. “Theoretically. Though – you know, I am against the heteronormative notion that penetrative sex is some kind of requisite for same-sex relationships,” ( _same-sex relationships_ Johnny mouths; _heteronormative?_ ) “like it's not _real_ sex unless you're recreating some mythical natural male-female act of insertion and reception.”

It should be the most unsexy string of words ever to come out of someone's mouth, but Johnny's mostly thinking about how Daniel is kind of a virgin, so the end result is still hot.

He chooses his next words very, very carefully. “Well. If you decide that you'd like to – recreate some mystical act of penetration,” he looks away from Daniel's narrowed eyes and stares blindly at the field, “I would be,” honored? delighted? “interested in helping you on that journey.”

His face twists, baffled. “ _What_?”

“Please let me be your first,” he says quickly, turning to him.

Daniel's expression collapses. He looks like he's two seconds from storming off, and not in the fun-hot way where Johnny can chase him down, because there are a lot of people in this park and being arrested for indecent exposure would definitely get him banned from working with minors.

“You realize this is why I didn't want to tell you, right,” says Daniel, flatly unamused. “Like, you realize how patronizing that kind of talk is. It's not like I'm some kind of fucking virgin, Johnny.”

He puts his hands up, placating. “I know, I know. But listen, look – I will make it so good for you, you don't even know. You don't even _know_ , it will be amazing. I will blow your mind. And hey, if I don't? Then you can rub it into my face for the rest of time. That's the Johnny Lawrence guarantee.”

“Right, because you've had loads of practice with all this,” says Daniel.

Is he calling him a slut? And does Johnny mind? “Well – more than you, apparently. Next thing you're going to tell me, you've never dated another man.”

Daniel's lips press together. He stares Johnny down, like he's daring him to continue.

“Oh.” But he's like forty? And he kissed Johnny in the eighties. You had to be really committed to do anything in the eighties; everywhere you turned, there was AIDS and Reagan's weirdly vacant rat gaze peering out at you from the TV. “Well, what about – one night stands? Hook-ups?”

He looks away, expression locked up tight, and Johnny feels the last remnants of his own humor fade away.

“Starting to think we really should've talked,” he says, a little lamely.

Daniel nods and stares at the field. “Yeah.”


	36. Chapter 36

The kids kick off, a line of little green jerseys meeting a line of blue: the ball lost amid the confusion.

> **Johnny**  
>  wait. are you sure  
> your even into men  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead  
> ** I made you fuck  
> my face last week.  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead  
> ** You fucking moron.  
> (.5 minutes used)

“Coach Lawrence,” says Coach Martin when Johnny returns to the sidelines. He is well on his way to sounding concerned, but only because he cheats and gets a head start every time. “Are you alright, you seem—”

“I'm fine,” he says shortly. “How are the kids looking?”

Coach Martin puts his hands on his hips and nods out at the field. “Great, real great. I think they've demonstrated some real improvement with our practices. They're already looking a lot better against this team than they did during the scrimmage at the start of the season. Guess it's like you said – ball control is key.”

And then he sort of chucks his fist into Johnny's shoulder, grinning a little. Johnny glances down at his shoulder and then slaps him in the back, hard.

“Well, it was a joint effort. You've been a lot of help.”

Coach Martin flushes a little and looks flustered but pleased. “Oh, well – I don't know, I mean. I just – it's actually been really nice? I'm thinking of maybe doing it again. But on a more formal basis?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, like – maybe there's more to life than angling for the next Qualcomm contract, you know?”

“I don't know what that is, but I'm sure of it.”

> **Johnny**  
>  attitutde like that bet  
> no one wanted to fuck  
> you  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead**  
>  Please, you wanted  
> to fuckme on the picnic  
> tables the moment  
> you saw me.  
> (.5 minutes used)

Johnny stares into the middle distance and thinks hard.

If Daniel is telling the truth, and he probably is, it makes no sense that he wouldn't have fooled around with another guy in all these years. Amanda said they started dating in 1999 – that's a solid decade and a half of ass he was free to grab. And as hot as he's been for Johnny, it's not like he doesn't have the sex drive. So what gives?

 _Maybe he was just that hung up on me?_ he thinks, and his stomach drops a little, because that – that's a lot to handle. A lot of pressure.

Like what if Johnny was the one that got away, and Daniel's been longing and waiting all this time, torturing himself over it? Oh fuck, what if Johnny ruined his marriage before it even started? What if Daniel's not even _into_ women? What if he spent all those years living a lie, and it was all because Johnny was too screwed up back then to properly look at him?

> **Johnny**  
>  did I ruin your life  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead**  
>  Was this ever in doubt?  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead**  
>  That was a joke.  
> (.5 minutes used)

“Good effort,” calls Coach Martin. “Great pass, Jackson, keep it up. Demetri, stay inside – stay inside.”

Johnny's face feels tight and warm, and he can't really focus on the game in front of him. He knows Coach Martin keeps glancing at him, uncertain or maybe uncomfortable. Johnny's usually a lot more vocal than this during games.

He tries to pull himself together – claps a bit and shouts vague encouragement, but he doesn't even know what the score is, how far into the half they are. If someone was to put a hand over his eyes and ask him which team had the ball, he'd have to guess.

In his pocket, his phone vibrates again.

> **larusso babe**  
>  What on earth did  
> you say to Daniel  
> earlier? He's acting  
> really weird.  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead**  
>  Seriously, I barely  
> ever thnk about back  
> then. Ancient history.  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shan**  
>  my stylist has a teenage  
> daughter who stares at  
> her phone less then u  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shan**  
>  your son is playing rly  
> good btw  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shan**  
>  get a fuckn grip johnny  
> (.5 minutes used)

There's a space of about four months in his memory that isn't really there.

Summer after high school, he drank so much, he didn't having a single real conversation with his mom. He pissed himself at night a couple times, had to hide the sheets. Got his first DUI.

He remembers not being able to feel the heat of July and August; it was like he was on some rock deep in space where the sun couldn't reach. He remembers walking around feeling like his skin was too small for his body, like any moment he was going to burst apart and leaving a gory wreck on the sidewalk, something for people to step around and drag their dogs away from sniffing.

One morning at some point before the leaves started to change color, he woke up on the floor of his garage and found two of his ribs on fire, cracked from a fight he couldn't summon the memory of no matter how hard he tried. He didn't drink that day, and the anxiety and headache from the withdrawal was so bad, he got scared and stopped for a whole month.

And that was the last time he let himself think about Daniel LaRusso for a very long time – when he couldn't breathe properly out of worry of breaking a rib, and his hands were trembling so bad he had to hide them in his pockets.

> **shithead**  
>  I'm telling you, it's  
> genuinely not like  
> that. not how you  
> think.  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **shithead**  
>  we were just kids.  
> (.5 minutes used)
> 
> **Johnny**  
>  were you in love with me?  
> [unable to send message]  
> [add more minutes]

“Shit,” he says.

“Yeah, that's not good,” says Coach Martin, and Johnny looks up in confusion, because since when does he know what's going on with his phone?

But in the middle of the field, Robby and Sam are rolling over the grass, punching and pulling each other's hair, screaming bloody murder.

“ _Shit_ ,” he says, and starts forward in a sprint.

Across the field, Daniel runs out as well.


	37. Chapter 37

Pulling little kids apart is hard to do when you're trying to be careful and not hurt either one, especially when they don't return the favor. Robby bites his wrist and Sam kicks him in the knee, and then Daniel arrives just as he's cursing up a storm.

“Oh, _nice_ ,” he says, taking his own squirming monster in hand.

“Shut up.” He shakes out his hand and adjusts his hold on Robby, who is still gamely reaching for Sam, face twisted up in fury. “What the hell, Robby? Chill out.”

“I think you need to remove these kids from the game,” says the ref, wisely staying back ten feet.

“You think?” says Daniel. At least he's spreading the bitchiness around.

“What do you think?” says Johnny. “Parking lot? If there's going to be some kind of meltdown, best it happen out in the open, away from other people.”

Amanda and Shannon both start edging along the sidelines, clearly seeing where they're headed and moving to intercept. This is going to be weird, he thinks. But there's nothing he can do about it.

He looks up from Robby's steadily reddening face and says, “Uh, just – real quick, want to tell you in case you didn't know and maybe want to overthink it or something but, I'm kinda friends with your ex-wife? Like, we were out drinking earlier in the week.”

Daniel catches a stray kick from Sam absently. He stares at Johnny.

“Just – putting that out there. Don't want you to think it because of any weird reason, I'm really not trying to—”

“I know you're not,” says Daniel. He looks away, lines of fatigue forming on his face. “I know.”

“Sam, what on earth has gotten into you?” says Amanda, hurrying forward over the grass.

They hit the concrete and Johnny swings Robby down to sit on a parking block. He crouches in front of him, tilting his head this-way-and-that. Aside from a scratch on his cheek, he appears unharmed.

“You shouldn't fight girls,” he tells him seriously. “At some point they learn to go for your junk, and trust me, it's all over then. Not. Fun.”

Robby hunches forward and stares at the ground beneath his sneakers, eyes blinking quickly, mouth twisted—shit. Shit.

“Hey, hey, Robby,” he starts, hands hovering; unsure what to do. “What's wrong?”

“Robby, baby,” says Shannon, arriving, and his son slips off the block and makes a beeline for her, hides his face against her hip, shoulders shaking. Johnny's never seen a kid cry so quietly. He feels caught, frozen – an impostor among the other three parents.

“So does anyone know what that was about?” asks Amanda, glancing around at them as she wipes dirt from Sam's face with a napkin.

Daniel looks down at his daughter. “Sam? Feel like sharing?”

She glares over at Robby. “He's going to take you away.”

Robby turns his head, freeing an eye to glare back. “No, he's always hanging around, and we don't want him!”

Amanda does some quick revelating, wide eyes bouncing between the kids and up to Daniel and over to Johnny.

“Oh,” she says. “Wow.”

Johnny rotates and sits on the parking block. He rubs his face and stares across the park as Daniel starts to stammer out words about how _it's not what you think_ and _Sam, no one's taking anyone away_ and _look, me and him, it's complicated, okay_.

“Johnny,” says Amanda, straightening up, tucking the napkin away into her purse. He angles an inquiring squint at her past his hands. “You think maybe you forgot some minor details the other night?”

He sighs and drops his hands. “I wasn't about to spill my guts over tequila shots, explaining your ex-husband happened to be the long lost love of my sad teenage years, okay. For one – I'm not that gay and two, it was only our first time hanging out.”

“Second, technically,” says Amanda, and Daniel stops staring at Johnny long enough to give her a disconcerted look.

“You did tequila shots and didn't invite me?” says Shannon over Robby's head. “This is why things could never work out between us, Johnny. You always exclude people.”

He puts out a hand. “I'm sorry you were home with our son?”

“Yeah, like you never are.”

Robby shoves away from Shannon, puts his head back, and screams.

It's the primal scream of an animal with its foot caught in a steel-jaw trap; the scream of millennia of creeping advancements in human civilization reversing itself in seconds. It is red-faced, full-throated, and somehow both fearless and completely terrified. It is a sound that says _I don't care if you hear me_ and _please someone fucking hear me_. It is a sound with a physical presence: an exploding bunker that makes Shannon and the others momentarily freeze and stare, and makes Johnny lunge forward and sweep Robby into a too-tight hug, because he knows how that sound feels.

He cups the back of Robby's head and bounces him a little, even though he's not an infant anymore. He presses his face into his hair and whispers in his ear, “It's okay, Robby, it's okay. I'm sorry. It's okay. I'm so sorry. But it's gonna be okay.”

He walks a little ways away from the others, and keeps hugging his son until he stops fighting it, stops struggling and goes limp, exhausted in his arms. And then he keeps hugging him, just because.  
  


* * *

  
“I'm going to go home with them,” he tells Daniel, a little later. “Spend some time sitting with Robby.”

“I think that sounds like a good idea,” says Daniel.

“Just – in case you had the idea that maybe I was as great being a dad as I am a boyfriend, you know – surprise!” He laughs a little. Shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down.

Amanda is standing over by her car, loading Sam and her gear into the back seat and clearly trying not to stare over at them. She and Shannon had exchanged maybe ten words before deciding through some mysterious female instinct that they weren't going to be friends, and it kind of made everything somehow even more awkward. So much for his barely-born dreams of group tequila shots.

“I can't believe I'm saying this,” says Daniel, “but try not to beat yourself up too bad about it. It's not too late, and you're trying.” Johnny glances up and Daniel gives him a slight smile. “I mean – this is you trying, right?”

“Yeah.” He glances at Amanda. “Sorry about outing you to your ex-wife.”

Daniel huffs a slight laugh. “She knew I had a – well. Look, we'll talk tomorrow, okay?”

He grimaces a little. “I'm out of minutes again.”

“Of course you are. That's what happens when you try to start something over a Tracfone. Cheap people don't get phone sex, Johnny.” His tone is back to normal, superior and maybe a little fond, and it brings an involuntary smile to Johnny's face, because he is a sick, sick man.

“Guess I'll have to settle for regular sex, then.”

Daniel licks his lip and shakes his head with another laugh, and that's how they part for the day, despite everything left unsaid: with smiles and a promise.


	38. Chapter 38

Bobby likes the middle-of-the-day time in the church on Sundays, when the building is mostly empty but has the warm feeling of people having just stepped out. The vaulting space always holds in some lingering sense of community and peace, like the walls and roof could insulate against more than just the weather.

Daniel LaRusso doesn't seem to feel the same way about the space, judging from the nonplussed expression on his face as he tilts his head to look up and around. He is wearing a suit, and Bobby doesn't know if this is his usual Sunday dress or an attempt at being respectful.

“Daniel,” he says, coming forward down the center, arm outstretched.

He is used to people who'd known him when he was younger doing the quick look-over, the flickering stolen glance that's never as subtle as they think. Kind of comes with the territory; luckily he knows he rocks the bald look. Like so much in life, it's all about confidence.

“Bobby Brown,” says Daniel, shaking his hand. “Wow. Look at you. You weren't kidding about the pastor thing, huh.”

“Not exactly the kind of joke that would net me cool points,” he says.

Daniel releases his hand and puts his own in his pockets, very casual. “Don't suppose we could've done this on more neutral ground.”

Daniel, he imagines, often gets told he hasn't changed one bit – and it's true, he looks almost startlingly young. But there is something tamped down and muted about him, like he isn't quite easy in his own skin and any second someone is going to call him on it.

“Does being in a church make you nervous?” he asks, curious. “It's okay if it does.”

Daniel shrugs one shoulder. “Nah. I mean. We stopped going a long time ago, basically after my dad died. I barely remember it. And it was – different from this place. Smaller, darker.” He looked around the bright church, expression not quite verging on dissatisfied; Catholic, guesses Bobby, a little pitying. “No booths, huh. Guess you guys don't go in for the whole confession thing?”

“Our faith doesn't hold with the old dogma of original sin. We don't believe any of us are born flawed or broken.” And when Daniel can't quite hide his skepticism, he asks, “Do you feel like you have something you need to confess? Something you feel the need to do penance for?”

Daniel puts his head back and laughs. He points at Bobby and gives him a knowing look. “You're pretty slick with this. The questions and the, the whole open thing. You're good, I can see why you do it.”

Bobby decides to let it drop. He didn't ask Daniel to stop by in order to convert him.

He folds his hands and says, “I should say, I'm actually the one looking to do penance right now. With everything going on with Johnny and you, I realized,” he pauses, reaching for the right words, “I never properly apologized for everything that happened senior year. And it is long past time I rectify that.”

Daniel frowns, puzzled. “You apologized, the knee healed – water under the bridge, man. It was your sensei, it's wasn't you – I know that.”

“Not just for the knee, and not even for the bullying, which I should've put a stop to and didn't, but yeah, that too.”

He looks around and puts his hand out to indicate they should sit. Daniel perches on the edge of a pew like the wood is going to reach out and swallow him if he lets his body follow the curve of the seat. Bobby settles in the row in front of him, because he figures that'll be more comfortable for the other man.

He knocks his wrist over the back of his pew and meets his eyes. Daniel looks like he'd prefer if Bobby stopped right there, but he is determined. And if Johnny “once drove to Mexico to avoid a conversation” Lawrence couldn't outlast Bobby, Daniel LaRusso with his boyish _who me?_ face didn't stand a chance.

“I thought I was doing the right thing, back then, letting Johnny figure things out by himself,” Bobby says. “Thought – if he wanted to hide, or bury it, or whatever, you know. Whatever he needed to do at the time.” He grimaces a little at the wide, emphatic expression Daniel gives him. “Yeah. Turns out letting your best friend try to claw his way back into the closet doesn't really work. By the time I realized how bad things were with him, we'd graduated and he— well. It was too late for you guys, anyway. And I'm sorry.”

Daniel's eyes crawl away and shakes his head. “It was the eighties, man. Don't beat yourself up. Pat Robertson never did.”

“I'm not beating myself up,” says Bobby simply. “I'm copping to my mistakes. I think it's important to acknowledge them, and their consequences, even if we meant well at the time. Perhaps especially then.”

“Right.” He looks down at his hands, tangled restlessly in his lap. “Well, I hear that.”

Bobby waits a beat. He clears his throat. “How are things going? With Johnny, I mean?”

Daniel angles him a look up through his lashes. “Is this leading to some kind of shotgun speech?”

He laughs. “Er, no. Johnny still practices karate most days of the week, he can take care of himself.” He sobers a little and risks adding, “I'm hoping he won't have to, though.”

“Right. Well.” He twists on the edge of the pew and sniffs a little, scratches his nose. Looks around the church some more. “I won't lie, my track record with this kind of thing isn't... great. I mean, every time I think I know what I'm doing, I'm so sure of it, and then it's like one day I look back and.” He shakes his head. “I don't know.”

Bobby watches him. “You can't have done that badly, you and Amanda seem like you're still on pretty good terms.” And when Daniel casts him a narrow look: “We kind of – had drinks earlier this week, it's a long story.”

“Right, the storied tequila shots,” says Daniel, to his surprise. “How the hell did you three even find each other? The Valley's a big place.”

“Maybe it was fate.” He shrugs. “...Or maybe it was Hooligan's Happy Hour specials, I don't know. Funny how those two things often overlap.”

Daniel breathes out a laugh. He still hasn't relaxed in his seat. Maybe he wouldn't unclench until he got back outside, or maybe this is just how he lived these days.

“I could never be completely open with her.”

It takes a second for Bobby to realize he's actually spoken, he's so quiet. Daniel stares down at the back of his pew, eyes fixed on the hymnal pamphlet.

“I don't know if it was my own instincts I didn't trust, or maybe hers. Eventually the distance broke us.”

“This doesn't sound like a sexuality thing,” he says carefully.

Daniel shakes his head slightly, eyes not lifting. “I had – a string of, bad encounters, let's say. After high school.” He shifts and clears his throat. “Kind of got to the point where, I thought – if someone wanted me, I had to wonder what was wrong with them. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I imagine that kind of constant vigilance can be rough on a marriage,” he says, neutral.

“Yeah – _man_.” Daniel laughs abruptly. “How did I end up more screwed up than Johnny Lawrence? I didn't think that was even possible.”

Bobby can't help but feel a little defensive then, because it's still too easy for him to picture Johnny with blood on his knuckles at nineteen; Johnny drunk and sobbing on the floor of their apartment at twenty.

“Johnny's done a lot of work to get where he is,” he says, a little sharply. “It wasn't easy, and it wasn't quick, and he had to fight like hell every inch of the way.”

Daniel doesn't say anything, but his throat works. After a second, he reaches up to rub his eyes, his mouth.

He gentles his tone. “But I know he didn't go easy on you back then either, and that's definitely on him. He knows that.”

 _Do you think you can try to trust him?_ he wants to ask. But maybe that's a step too far, too involved? Daniel isn't the only man who has questioned his own instincts over the years. People look to Bobby for guidance all the time, it comes with the job, and on bad days he stares in the mirror and wonders why.

Bobby looks up at his church and tries to ground himself in that feeling, that Sunday quiet where he can pretend things are simple and easy, clean fixes delivered in a sermon. He lets it fill him, and he says:

“I think Johnny wants to try with you. And – there's a lot wrong with that man, as we both know, but I don't think this is one of those things. If you can't trust yourself, maybe try to trust that.”

Daniel nods slowly and offers him a slight smile. "You're good at this," he says again. "I can see why you do it.”

Bobby shrugs.


	39. Chapter 39

On Monday after work, Johnny showers. He does one hundred push-ups and sit-ups and then showers again. He stretches. He contemplates his date clothes, then wonders if he's thinking about this the wrong way, since they never technically called it a date. Maybe he's being presumptuous? He thinks maybe he should jerk off: goes and takes another shower. He regrets it immediately afterwards (the jerking off, not the shower).

When he's ready, dressed down in jeans and a band T-shirt, but one that he knows is particularly good for his arms, he drives over to Daniel's apartment. His hands fiddle with the radio, the temperature controls, his steering wheel. His left knee bounces.

Daniel lives on the fifth floor of an unassuming building. The narrow hallway has twelve-foot ceilings that give Johnny the feeling of being squeezed, like the trash compactor scene from A New Hope. It makes him want to get out of it as quickly as possible and adds some terseness to his knock on the apartment door.

The man who opens the door looks both younger and older than Daniel, his general demeanor of clueless youth combining with a confusing facial hair situation. Johnny glances at the apartment number; he's pretty sure it's the right one. Almost positive.

“Hi,” he says.

The man pokes his head out and glances up and down the hallway on either side of him. Johnny narrows his eyes and refuses to lean back.

“Hey, man. How's it going?” He has a New Jersey accent, which makes Johnny think this is, perhaps, the right apartment. And Daniel had said something about a roommate at one point a while back, right? “So – you the new guy?”

New guy? That means there was an old guy at some point, right? To be new there had to be old.

“I – hm,” says Johnny, and he settles for squinting. You stare someone down hard enough, they usually either clear out of the way real quick or start talking.

Sure enough, the man starts talking. “Listen, bro, I appreciate you're new, but – you ain't supposed to be here.”

“I'm not?”

“No, you're supposed to wait for a text. Surely this was explained to you. It's just common sense – not to mention, not to put too fine a point on it but, like... manners.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I know,” says Johnny, digging out his now-useless tracfone and waving it a little lamely, “but I kind of ran out of minutes the other day, and I haven't had a chance to refill this thing.”

The man's expression lightens a little, and he nods in understanding. “I get it. I, too, used to play the minutes game – lemme tell you, life is so much better when you get on a proper plan – hey, I could maybe hook you up? I'm like _this_ close to landing a gig at the Sprint location down on Woodley and Strathern.”

“Yeah? Good for you, man,” says Johnny. He shifts on his feet and tucks the phone away. “But anyway – listen, this _is_ Daniel LaRusso's place, right?”

The man's smile drops like he threw weights at it. “Whoa, whoa, you don't gotta be dragging him into this. I told Peter I'm good for it. What, he don't believe me?”

Johnny's had enough. “Who's Peter?” he asks, pushing his way into the apartment and ignoring the man's undignified yelping protests. He looks around and starts to call out, “Hey, Daniel—”

And then he gets hit by something hard in the shoulder. He crumples to one knee, hand coming up. “What the fuck?” He looks up at the man, who is now holding an aluminum bat.

“I'm not messing around,” he says in a loud whisper. He brandishes the bat threateningly. “Now you get the hell outta here and tell Peter, I'll have his money in like, a week. Maybe two? I don't know, I'm not super liquid right now. There's _a lot_ of competition in the pot game these days, what's up with that?”

With his mind cloudy from pain and confusion, Johnny falls back on what he knows. He slaps a hand on the floor, twists his hips, and kicks the man's legs out from beneath him. He crashes to the floor, head knocking over the small shoe rack by the door.

“Who the fuck is Peter?” demands Johnny loudly. “And who are you?”

The man only groans in response.

“ _Johnny_?” comes Daniel's voice from another room, deep into the apartment. “Is that you?”

He appears in the doorway on the far side of the room, wearing nothing but underwear and gold-toed trouser socks like a very hot dork. He goggles at the two of them lying on the floor.

“Boxer briefs,” says Johnny with some relief. He scoots backwards so he can sit against the wall and admire the view while giving support to his aching shoulder. “Nice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for this chapter, really. But I had to fuck with johnny one last time; this version of him bops around inside my head with a permanent 'kick me' sign fixed to his forehead (yes, forehead) and I'm going to miss him.


	40. Chapter 40

Daniel is quick in hauling them both to their feet, and it's not fair that Johnny can't even grab his ass or anything, even though it's _right_ _there_ , because the man's busy checking his confused cousin's head and then rushing him out the door.

“But where am I supposed to go?” says Louie, shoving his feet into shoes. He puts his hands out, pleading. “I can't afford a hotel, there's like three insurance conventions going on in the valley right now—”

“You know Ma is always happy to see you,” says Daniel, turning back to hand him his wallet and keys. Johnny sits on the arm of the sofa and tries to be discreet in staring at the inside line of his legs, all that tan skin leading to the prize, the jewel, the national treasure of new jersey wrapped up in tight black cotton—

“You want me to stay with Aunt Lucille?” cries Louie, backing up over the threshold of the door, “Aw, Daniel—”

Daniel, full of mercy but not just then, shuts the door on him. Then he immediately opens it again and stabs a finger in his cousin's surprised face. “And don't think we're not gonna talk about whatever you have going with that Peter guy.”

Louie's shoulders slump and Daniel draws the curtains on his dejection by shutting the door again. After a second, he reaches back and turns the lock. The _snick_ is very loud in the sudden quiet of the apartment.

Daniel looks at him. He wanders over to his kitchen and it's like he's trying to maintain a restraining order radius or something. His hand comes up to scratch at his eyebrow. “Are you, uh. Okay? He get you with the bat?”

Johnny can barely feel his shoulder, which is the only reason he doesn't shrug. “Not the first time I been hit with a bat, and that thing isn't exactly a Louisville Slugger. Where'd he get it, K-Mart?”

Daniel blinks in distraction at the metal bat by the door. “I have no idea.” He seems to realize he's mostly naked and Johnny, looking to forestall whatever insane idea of dressing he can see forming in his mind, says:

“I take it he doesn't know about – all this,” and he gestures between them. Daniel folds his hands over his hips and shakes his head. “Do you ever tell anyone about anything?”

“I tell Mr. Miyagi everything,” he says, a little defensive.

“Your old sensei?” Daniel nods; Johnny's eyebrows shoot up. “What, like. Everything-everything?”

He narrows his eyes. “What do you think, Johnny?”

And Johnny's not thinking, that's kind of the problem. Some part of him insists he shouldn't have to, that this feeling between them is so obvious, so right, that everything will just work itself out so long as he can get his hands on Daniel's tight little body.

Feeling a little lost, he gropes for the first subject that comes to mind. “So you still do karate? I mean, I know you must a little, you tried to kick my head in the other week. But like.”

Daniel rubs his elbow and folds his arms. He looks down at his feet flexing over the rug. “Yeah, a little. Me and Mr. Miyagi – it's not training, really. But we do kata together. It helps clear my head, and they say it's important for the elderly to keep as active as they can, so.”

“Well – would you want to spar some time?” asks Johnny. He's aching to reach out and pull him close. He curls his hands into fists and hides them by crossing his own arms.

“ _Spar_?” laughs Daniel, a little incredulous for some reason. He shakes his head and makes a face. “I don't – I don't fight. I don't do that anymore.”

“Why not? You were good. I mean, for a short-ass punk who hated conditioning,” he adds, because being a little in love with a guy shouldn't come before acknowledging his deep character flaws. Daniel bites his lip and he says, a little coaxing, “C'mon, it'd be fun. We fought well together.”

“What are you. Are you talking about the – what, the tournament? The All Valley?” he asks, sounding mystified.

“What else?” he says, nonplussed.

“Jesus, Johnny, I barely remember that.”

He takes a couple seconds to absorb this, but it feels so incompatible with his reality, the foundations of his world, it doesn't really take.

“Really?” he checks, “But – don't you remember, I was going to forfeit, and you—”

“Talked you out of it, yeah, yeah.” Daniel sighs and rubs the back of his neck. “I remember that part, sure.”

Johnny is so struck by his dismissive tone, he startles up from the sofa. It takes him a moment to put words in the right order to reply. Daniel watches him the whole time, body having gone alert and tense the moment Johnny moved. He wishes he could take hold of him, but he thinks – incredibly, almost disbelieving of his own instincts, he thinks: this is something he needs to say without mixing it up with sex, with his own want.

“Daniel, that day, what you did – that was probably the most important thing anyone's ever done for me. I don't – I don't want to think what I would've done. If I'd listened to my sensei, or if I'd quit the match. Way I was back then, I don't think it would've been – good.”

And when Daniel continues to only blink at him, he keeps trying, even though he suspects he's fucking it all up.

“You, Bobby – everyone talks about back then like it was this awful thing, and I guess, probably it was – your fucking knee, I know. I know. But that's not what I remember. Not what stuck, not what I, I _think_ about, when I think about you and me. What I remember is afterwards, after the tournament – finally being able to fucking breathe. And it was you, it was all down to you. You were the one who helped me do it.”

“What the actual fuck are you talking about?” says Daniel softly, and it's almost more of a slap to the face because of how quiet he is. He turns in place, shaking his head, and braces his hands back against his kitchen counter. “Johnny, you spent the rest of the year barely talking to me. And, and after _prom_ —”

Johnny winces. It's hard, making himself not look away. “Didn't say I didn't have, uh, other issues.” Daniel shakes his head again, mouth pressing tight. Johnny stares at the side of his face. “I'm sorry. I was a – really confused kid. But that didn't have anything to do with you. It wasn't your fault.”

Daniel shuts his eyes.

Johnny watches the flicker in the muscle above his knee, the clench of his fingers around the counter top. His throat works, and for all he says he doesn't fight anymore, he looks like he's fighting himself pretty hard just then.

“Could you,” says Daniel, not opening his eyes. “Just – please, c'mere, just—” and he puts out a hand.

Johnny crosses to him in an instant, takes his hand in a grip that's probably too hard but Daniel doesn't look like he cares. He folds forward, pressing his face to Johnny's neck and breathing him in. He brings his arm up around the man's bare back and Daniel's body seems to go liquid against him.

Johnny says, “If it makes you feel better, I was pretty fucked up for like three solid months after prom.”

“Why would that make me feel better?” Daniel mutters, dragging his mouth slowly over his neck, nosing the collar of his shirt aside.

“Because you can be kinda vindictive?” And he tightens his hold surreptitiously, in case Daniel decides to squirm away; Johnny's not letting him go, not now. He's only human.

But the man doesn't do anything, and when he speaks, he sounds almost drugged. “I'm surprised you even know that word.”

“Babe, I'd memorize a whole thesaurus for you.” Daniel raises his head to blink at him, probably searching for the compliment in that (there isn't one), and Johnny takes advantage of his distraction to wrap his hands under those slim thighs and hoist him onto the counter. He tucks the tips of his fingers under the waistband of his boxer briefs.

Daniel's legs are with the program, wrapping around his middle even as the man tries to look nothing but resigned. His lashes fall and he runs his hands up Johnny's arms. At his shoulders, he pauses.

“Did Louie hit you here?” he asks Johnny, hand hovering.

“Maybe,” he says, bending forward to press a kiss to his chest.

“You need to get ice on this,” says Daniel. He's sounding more like his usual self by the second, and it's terrible. “It's hot, I think it's gonna be a nasty bruise.”

“Daniel.”

“Yeah.”

“Bruises heal,” he says, and kisses him.


	41. Chapter 41

“You know you won't be able to leave this time,” Johnny says between soft, lingering kisses. He pauses. “I mean – you could, but it'd be weird because it's your place.” Now that he's thinking about it, he's not sure he wouldn't put it past Daniel. He might go to the coffee shop around the corner and try to wait Johnny out. He leans back a little to look at him, grip tightening; eyes suspicious.

But Daniel is smiling slightly. “Who's to say I won't kick you out when we're done?”

“Go ahead and try.” He drags his mouth along the other man's temple. Reaches his ear and whispers, “I'm not going anywhere.”

Daniel shudders in his arms. Moving like a man at the end of his rope, his hands come up to grab Johnny's face. He lets him take control of the kiss, lick into his mouth.

Daniel's legs drop and he slides off the counter, pushing Johnny with his whole body. He walks him backwards, not letting their lips separate. They bump into the table, a bookcase, and fumble their way through to the hallway. It goes more smoothly from there.  
  


* * *

  
He would've made a game plan if it had occurred to him, because he needs one: he doesn't know what he wants to do first.

Every part of him wants every part of Daniel.

He wants to bite the inside of his thighs, wants to stroke the soft skin under his forearm, wants to bend him in half to see if he's still as flexible as he once was and maybe make fun of him when he isn't, wants to wrap his arms around that trim waist and never let go; wants to hear him gasp out Johnny's name so they both know exactly who is giving him this.

So he starts with all that.  
  


* * *

  
Daniel's hand catches his wrist as he opens the small bottle of lube he'd tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, now crumpled on the corner of the bed.

“What is that, KY?” he says, nose wrinkling.

“Yeah, it's for—”

Daniel snatches it from his hand and launches the bottle hard against the wall.

Johnny stares after it and then down at him. “What the hell?”

“Might as well be using WD-40,” he says, voice muffled as he leans over to dig through his bedside table. He tosses a much fancier bottle at him, and Johnny shakes his head in disbelief.

“It's not even your asshole,” he says but he uncaps the stuff and fine, it smells nicer. Besides the point.

Daniel falls back and waves a hand airily before tucking it behind his head. “Carry on.”

Despite his show of smugness, his face is flushed and he can't quite meet his eyes. And when Johnny sinks down on him, Daniel bites his own forearm and twists and _shakes_.  
  


* * *

  
“Look at me,” says Johnny. “Daniel, look at me. I need to see you, man.”

Daniel tosses his head on the pillow, hands skating down Johnny's thighs. He pushes his hips up in an uncontrolled thrust.

"Daniel, please."

He opens his eyes and lets Johnny in.  
  


* * *

  
Everything. You're everything, he tells him between kisses. Twenty fucking years and I still thought of you every time I saw an apple in the store or someone drinking a Sierra Nevada. Sometimes it's like you were someone I made up, like it was all in my head. Fantasy shit, you think about a person who'd be perfect for you, everything you could want, even the annoying parts. God, you were so annoying.

I would dream about you, maybe a couple times a year. And it was always so easy, you'd be there and I'd be there and, and we wouldn't even be doing anything, but I'd wake up feeling like someone reached in and scooped out my guts. I'd wonder where you were, what you were doing. Just wanted to see you, thought it'd be okay if I just could see you and know.

Johnny—

If you let me, just. Please let me.

I am. Johnny, I am.

The worst parts were when I'd forget you. Days and weeks, whole months where I wouldn't think of you even once, and life was just. It was fine. It was whatever. But even not having you was better than not knowing you. Like just the possibility of Daniel fucking LaRusso made me think things I'd never think, made me a different person than I ever could be, and I want to be that person, Daniel. Daniel. Daniel. I want to be him with you.

Johnny.

Not to feed your ego. Like, your head's plenty big enough. God, fuck, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you so much, I always have.

Jesus, Johnny.  
  


* * *

  
He awakens in the middle of the night to Daniel tossing and turning in place next to him: not distressed but restless. His left foot twitches up against the sheet and his hands make complicated little gestures, like he's arguing with someone in his dreams. Johnny didn't know it was possible to be so Italian while asleep.

He remembers he's allowed to touch him now, and wastes no more time rolling over and wrapping an arm across his chest, slinging his leg heavy over Daniel's. He buries his face in the pillow and tries to go back to sleep.

“Not the crabapples,” mumbles Daniel.

Johnny tightens his arm. “Quiet.”

Daniel settles.  
  


* * *

  
Johnny is alone in bed come morning, but only because Daniel is doing kata over by the window.

He's wearing shorts and Johnny's T-shirt, and just this once Johnny is willing to forgive the man for having clothes that don't fit, because _he's wearing Johnny's T-shirt._

He rolls onto his belly and shoves a pillow under his chin, settling in to watch.

Daniel executes a smooth front kick. His mouth curls and he says without looking over, “I can feel you perving from over here.”

“You're welcome to feel it from closer,” says Johnny.

His eyes flick to their corners, watching him. “I'm not finished yet.”

Johnny would like to test the bounds of his commitment, but in the end his respect for karate wins out, and he doesn't start jerking off to lure the man over. His lies there quietly and watches him move against the morning light pouring in through the window. He feels quiet and perfectly still.

Daniel turns, steps, and blocks and says, “Year after high school, I got into a fight with Mr. Miyagi. It was over something stupid, I forget. But I ended up joining Cobra Kai for a while.”

Johnny blinks and stirs. He raises his head a little off the pillow. “Cobra Kai? I thought Kreese—”

“There was someone else running it.” Right low block, circling into a downward hammer fist. “A man. He was. He acted like – he liked me. Saw something in me. And he was exciting.”

Johnny doesn't like the sound of this, but he doesn't know what to do except remain still and listen. He thinks if he moves an inch, Daniel might stop talking.

“I thought I knew what I was doing,” says Daniel. His brow is pinched in concentration, looking far too intent for the simple transition into a left front stance; a middle lunge punch. He doesn't say anything more, so Johnny clears his throat quietly.

“He,” says Johnny. He swallows and makes himself continue. “Did he—”

“What?” Daniel glances at him quickly. “No – no, nothing like that. I wanted it. I mean, I, I pursued it. But it was just – it didn't feel right. Wasn't good, and – look,” he says, turning around into a right front stance, but he's slightly stiff with it, like it's not the regular sequence; like he just needed to face away from Johnny, “long story short, the whole thing was messed up and then it ended badly. I didn't even end up fighting in the tournament that December. Decided it was time I finally listened to Mr. Miyagi on that front.”

Daniel shifts into a ready stance and then all at once seems to give up on continuing the kata. His shoulders fall and he looks down at his feet. “I haven't, uh. I haven't touched a man since.”

Johnny sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His hands flex in his lap, fretting uselessly, decades too late. It has never occurred to him that life could go the other way, that the world could take a kid as brave as Daniel and break him down.

Daniel glances around. He is dry-eyed and calm and even sounds self-deprecating as he admits, “Look, I'm only telling you this because I want you to know,” Johnny stares at him and he shrugs a little helplessly, “I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.”

“And you think I do?” asks Johnny.

He waves a hand. “Oh, no. I know you don't. You thought becoming friends with my ex-wife was a smart move. I mean, who does that?”

“You joined the YMCA just so you could bump into me.”

“I was already a member,” he tries saying, but Johnny cuts him off.

“Roy Barrett gave you up, man. Just admit it.”

Daniel looks away. “Fucking millennials,” he mutters after a moment. “He kept going on and on about toxic masculinity and how I had to learn to be more open.” He puts _open_ in air quotes, as any self-respecting man would.

“I thought Roy was straight,” says Johnny, suddenly wondering if he needed to have a talk with this kid.

“He is.”

“Then what the hell.”

During this, Daniel has wandered over, like bitching was exactly what he needed to let his guard down and relax again. He pushes Johnny back onto the bed and crawls on top of him and then just sort of flops down, pressing his cheek to his bare chest. Johnny slips a hand under his shirt ( _his_ shirt) and presses his fingertips to the dimples on either side of his spine.

Daniel lets out a long breath. “Now what?”

“Sex?” Because he can feel Daniel's half-interested dick against his thigh.

He digs his thumbnail into Johnny's side. “I meant after that.”

“Don't you have to go to work?”

Daniel shuts his eyes and groans. He buries his face against Johnny's chest and gives a heartfelt, “Fuck.”


	42. goooooal

Robby frowns, hazel eyes flickering over the field and sideline. He shakes his head. “He's not coming.”

“Oh, sweetheart, you just love losing money to an old woman, don't you,” says Lucille.

“Ma, quit teasing him,” says Daniel, pocketing his phone. To Robby, he says, “Look, he's on his way. There was an accident on the 710. Just – focus on the game, alright.”

The teenager nods and breathes out. He jumps a little in place to keep warmed up. Someone on the field calls his name, and he gives Lucille a quick kiss on the cheek before jogging out to join his teammates.

“I don't know what you're talking about, he seems just fine to me,” she says, and Daniel has to roll his eyes.

“Sure, he's behaving now. You're here. You should hear the fights he and Johnny have been getting into the past couple months. You wouldn't recognize the kid.”

“You want me to move in, all you have to do is ask,” she says, _sotto voce_.

He snorts. “Ma, I need to even the odds against me, not stack them worse than ever.”

She swats his arm. “What are you talking about? I always take your side, you're my sweet boy, my one and only.”

He curls his mouth and nods. Yeah, yeah; where's he heard that before.  
  


* * *

  
Johnny arrives a couple minutes after kickoff, announcing himself by pressing a rough kiss against Daniel's temple and stealing Shannon's thermos of spiked coffee.

Daniel turns, trailing a hand over his waist a moment before letting it drop. “Hey. How'd it go?”

Johnny lowers the thermos. “Sam kicked ass, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But more importantly—”

Daniel raises an eyebrow.

“Amanda nearly got into it with one of the Topanga fathers.”

“ _Really_.”

Johnny makes an immature noise one would fight not to call a snicker. He raises the thermos again and mutters around the opening, “We'll make a karate mom out of her yet. Just wait.”

“Not natural, if you ask me, a mother getting excited about karate,” says Lucille. “Your baby could get hurt.”

“Agreed,” says Shannon. They had bonded long ago over a love for Robby and skepticism of Amanda. Johnny and Daniel, as always, wisely stay silent and out of the whole situation.

After a minute, Johnny nods to the field. “How's Robby looking.”

“Good – I mean, it just started, but I think he's got his game face on.”

“Does Rick have him playing center forward?” But he studies the field and finds the answer for himself.

“Johnny.” The man starts forward, ignoring Shannon's sharp complaint as he takes her thermos with him. “Johnny, goddammit.”

And then apparently it's time for Daniel to bid goodbye to Lucille and Shannon and spend the rest of the game at the sidelines, trying to play go-between Johnny and the coach. Because god forbid his son play midfield.  
  


* * *

  
Bloodshed is averted on the sidelines but only because Coach Martin is the most dispassionate man in the history of high school sports and refuses to engage disgruntled parents. Even Johnny Lawrence; perhaps especially Johnny Lawrence.

They end up lingering even after the not-argument, because Daniel and Kristina get to talking about the new anti-bullying initiative at the school. Daniel thinks it sounds like a goddamn joke, but Kristina is reluctant to pass judgment on a fellow practitioner in her field, which is Kristina-speak for _get two drinks in me and then we'll really talk._

Johnny says, “You know, if Counselor Blatt would just get off her high horse, and get on board with my Dicks Get Kicks program, I'm just saying, maybe they wouldn't have a problem at the school.”

“You think karate is the solution to everything,” says Daniel. Kristina turns and gives him a speaking look; it's less formidable without the reading glasses she wears in session, but still pretty effective. He says defensively, “I can say that. My karate's different, it's not the same thing.”

“Yeah, yeah, your karate can like, end hunger and bring world fucking peace,” says Johnny, putting an arm around him. He is reflexively physically affectionate whenever he makes fun of Daniel, it's some kind of glitch in his former bully brain, and Daniel minds it not at all.

“John,” calls Coach Martin over by the water cooler, “we've talked about this, I really can't have that kind of language on the sidelines. Keep it clean, please.”

“Rick, you should've heard the stuff our coach used to say to us. These kids need to toughen up. They'll respect you more if you throw a couple fucks at them.”

“They respect me just fine,” says Coach Martin tolerantly. And yeah, the weird thing was, they did. Daniel and Johnny have talked about it probably one hundred times and still haven't been able to work out the man's secret.  
  


* * *

  
Twenty minutes into the first half, Daniel decides to broach the subject.

“Johnny.”

Johnny folds his arms across his chest and doesn't look away from the field. “Mm.”

“Earlier I was looking over your tax return and the last couple quarterly payments.”

“That's what I love about you, Babe,” he says, clearly not really paying attention. “That bulletproof confidence. To think you could stand there and talk about taxes outside of April and anyone would want to have sex with you. You're amazing.”

And just for that, Daniel waits until the man is tipping the thermos back again before he says, “I decided we should get married.” And as Johnny inhales coffee and starts to sputter and cough, he continues pleasantly, “Bobby's game to do the ceremony, of course, though I think Ma's gonna feel a little weird about doing it in a Protestant church. Shan said she'd be willing to walk you down the aisle.”

Johnny's bent over, still coughing. He looks up at Daniel; face a violent shade of red, blue eyes swimming with tears. “You're fucking with me,” he grates out, realizing.

“Only partly,” he says. “I do think it's a conversation we should have. The tax benefits—” And then Johnny's straightening up and marching away, and suddenly it seems less funny.

Daniel shoves his hands in his jacket pockets and mutters, “Okay, whatever.”  
  


* * *

  
“Ohmy _god_ , I would've hit you,” says Shannon. “And I don't even do karate like you guys. I'm a peaceful person. But seriously, Daniel, what were you thinking?”

“That it would be funny,” he says again. Because it _was_ , and he didn't care if he had to canvass the entire sidelines to find someone who agreed with him. Rick? No. Kristina? Maybe. His ma? She'd probably disown him if she knew; she was always taking Johnny's side.

“You're _so_ mean. Johnny's like. A romantic about that kind of thing.”

Horseshit? “The man tried to take me to Wrestlemania for our tenth anniversary.”

She wrinkles her nose. “I didn't say he was good at it.”

His hands clench in his pockets, and he looks around for Johnny with a trace of guilt. He's not in the stands, he's not next to Ma or the coaching staff. He wouldn't have left the game, surely. Robby would be disappointed but pretend he wasn't, and the resulting passive aggressive exhaust leaking out his sides would make life around the house unbearable.

The first half ends, the score tied at 0-0. Daniel waves at Robby before he enters the locker room with the rest of the team, and then he goes looking for Johnny.  
  


* * *

  
He finds the fully-grown adult man sulking over on the practice field, sitting on the grass with his knees on his elbows and staring across at the half-full parking lot. He sees Johnny see him coming and takes it as an encouraging sign that he doesn't get up and walk away.

“Excuse me,” he says, coming to stand in front of him. “I'm looking for a man who can sweep me off my feet. Know where I can find one?”

Johnny's mouth twists but he doesn't look up. Daniel's about to commit to growing concerned, but like for real this time, except finally the other man moves to sweep his leg. He hops easily over the telegraphed move and crouches in front of him, hands on Johnny's knees.

“Hey,” he says.

“You're such a dick,” says Johnny.

Daniel rubs his kneecaps and looks down. “Yeah, I know.”

“You know, what if, what if I had been planning something? Ever think of that, Daniel? What if I'd been planning to ask you, and you just came along and turned it into some fucking tax scheme, you little _prick_ —”

“You weren't planning something, were you?” he asks, a little uneasy.

“Guess you'll never know.”

“Aw, c'mon.” He jostles the man's knees, and when this fails to elicit a smile or any sign of softening, he kneels and leans forward to kiss him. He's not above fighting dirty in this one area, not when Johnny is so very easy. He always lets Daniel touch him, and it still kind of does his head in.

“I should make you wear my class ring as a wedding band,” mumbles Johnny against his lips. But the words turn into a real, if reluctant, returned kiss.

“You cheap bastard,” says Daniel, leaning back. “I'm almost 51 years old, I'm not going to walk around wearing a class ring. Especially since – we were in the same class. I'd basically be wearing _my_ class ring. I'd look like one of those sad sacks who think high school was the best years of my life. Not to mention, recall, our class rings were seriously tacky. You remember those clunky things?”

“Okay, no class ring, got it,” says Johnny.

“Yeah. Yeah, you got it.”

“Guess it's good I got you this one instead,” he says and flips something shiny through the air.

Daniel catches it automatically and blinks down at the plain gold wedding band in his palm.

He collapses back on his heels and looks at Johnny, who reclines back on his elbows and squints up at the deepening evening sky. Daniel looks around the practice field. He twists to stare at the equipment shed. It's not the same one, of course. But.

He turns back to Johnny, who has lost control of the smirk growing on his face.

“Did you plan this?” he demands.

“Nope,” says Johnny, idly swinging his crossed feet: really starting to enjoy himself. “I was going to do the adult thing where I take you out to a nice dinner and hold your hand in public. Tell you how much you mean to me, how I wanted to grow old and boring with you – you know, all that crap. But then you decided to tell me we were getting married for the tax benefits on the sidelines of a regular season high school soccer game—”

“Would it have bothered you less if it was a playoff game?” interrupts Daniel, fascinated despite the cold horror growing somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Honestly? Yeah, a little.”

Daniel weighs the ring in his hand, the surprising heft that always comes with gold. He wonders idly if Johnny got it from the pawn shop near his dojo.

“I know,” says Johnny, and now he sounds slightly more nervous, “I know you once said that marriage is unnecessary and that—ass thing.”

“Assimilationist,” says Daniel absently. He pinches the ring between his thumb and forefinger and studies it.

“Yeah, that. But um. I just – I've been thinking. Robby and Sam, they're getting older. They're going to stop bouncing between all the houses and move out and it's just gonna be you and me, man. And I, well. I really want to marry you. Seems only fair, you've been married, I haven't. And I figure, if you don't care either way, then we should just do it. It's like how sometimes you're fine with either takeout from that shitty Asian fusion place or pizza, and I hate the fusion place because it's gross, so we get the pizza....”

Daniel hurriedly kisses him before he can ruin the moment any further. Johnny's arms come around him instantly, and they tip back onto the cool grass.  
  


* * *

  
West Valley comes roaring out in the second half and scores two goals in quick succession. After each point the students in the stands blast the chorus of Ricky Martin's _Vente Pa' Ca,_ and Coach Martin throws his hat in the air in bemused acknowledgment.

Daniel can tell Robby is a little confused by his grandmother's exuberance, her completely over-the-top joy at the team's win, but they decide to wait to tell him the good news – not wanting to step on the triumph of a regular season high school soccer game and all.

“High school sweethearts, finally getting married,” cries Lucille when Robby leaves them for the locker room. “Boys, it's so romantic.”

“We weren't _technically_ high school sweethearts,” says Daniel.

Johnny hugs him from behind, propping his chin on Daniel's shoulder. He always gets extra demonstrative around Lucille, because he is, in fact, an incredible suck-up and shameless mama's boy.

As if to prove Daniel's point, Johnny says to Lucille, “It is romantic. You should've seen the look on Daniel's face.”

His ma clasps her hands together and melts. Daniel smiles and wonders if he can get away with viciously elbowing his high school sweetheart in the ribs.

Afterwards in the parking lot, Robby does an exceedingly poor job of hiding how desperately he wants to abandon his assemblage of loving family to go party with his teammates. He accepts kisses from Shannon and Lucille, a hug from Daniel, and a handshake from Johnny, and then he's off like bullet on his skateboard, calling ahead to his friends.

“Late dinner?” says Lucille, looking around at the them all.

“Can't,” says Daniel with regret, “We agreed to help clean up. Booster club thing.”

And there isn't much that will make someone disappear quite as fast as mentioning cleaning up after a high school sporting event; in short order, both the women are gone, and he and Johnny are left under the darkening sky with a full set of bleachers to pick up.

“Why did we agree to do this again?” says Johnny. He looks at the roll of black garbage bags sitting a few feet away and bypasses it to drag one of the spare game balls closer.

“I think it's Kristina's fault? She mentioned it in a session and next thing I knew, I'd signed us up.” Daniel wonders if there was some breach of ethics involved there. There are certain things a psychologist should not do with a patient: all the obvious stuff, but also: twist their arm into joining a fucking booster club.

Johnny passes him the ball. “So what you're really saying is that it's _your_ fault. I knew it. You're always finding new ways to ruin my life.”

Daniel nudges it into place with his laces. “Oh please. You want to marry me. You want to wake up next to me every day and suck my dick until I can't get it up anymore. You love me.”

Johnny shoves the sleeves of his sweater up and bends his knees a little, preparing. At Daniel's words, he looks up and meets his eyes. He smiles.

“Yeah, I do.”

Daniel sends the ball high into the air. They both look up to track it.

“Bet you can't,” says Johnny quickly, before it falls. And Daniel doesn't have to ask him to specify, because for the less important things they've never needed words. He whispers a quick mental good luck to his spine, and when the ball drops—

He leans back, jumps, and heads it straight at Johnny.


End file.
